Full Text

News

The City of Berkeley will not get a Caltrans Community-based Transit Planning Grant to plan a large condo development for the west parking lot of the Ashby BART station. Winning cities were posted on the Caltrans web site late Friday afternoon, and Berkeley was not among them.

The application, which referenced a 300-plus-unit project, was sponsored by Mayor Tom Bates and Councilmember Max Anderson and spearheaded by development specialist Ed Church, using the South Berkeley Neighborhood Development Corporation as the community agency sponsor.

Neighbors and flea market vendors had greeted the proposal with reactions ranging from skepticism to hostility, which they communicated vigorously to the Caltrans decisonmakers.

See next Friday’s Daily Planet Weekend Issue for further developments.

Responding to a package of proposals aimed at shoring up struggling businesses on Telegraph Avenue—more police, social services, better marketing, upgraded facades, brighter lighting, faster permitting and a new green machine to scrub the sidewalks—Marc Weinstein, owner of Amoeba Music, shared a unique perspective on the Avenue’s economic downturn at Tuesday’s City Council meeting.

Like other businesses on Telegraph, Weinstein said Amoeba Music is suffering, having lost 15 percent of revenue each year for the last two years.

Weinstein told the council he has two similar yet thriving stores, one on Haight Street in San Francisco and another in Hollywood in Los Angeles. Their superior performance, he said, shows that the decline in local business cannot be attributed to chain or Internet competition, a factor in the announced closing of Cody’s Books on Telegraph.

The 11 percent commercial vacancy on Telegraph, a result of “ridiculously high” rents, hurts the businesses that stay, Weinstein said, blaming the situation on landlords who “only care about getting as much money out of the property as they can.”

He pointed specifically to Gordon Commercial Real Estate Services as a property management company that keeps Telegraph area properties vacant.

It’s true, he said, that closer to campus higher rents are charged. “We don’t set the rates,” he said. “It’s just a matter of supply and demand.”

Still, he said, “We would hold a space to get a good tenant,” rather than a tattoo parlor, for example. “We want a tenant that can do the volume to pay that kind of rent,” he said.

Councilmember Kriss Worthington, who presented the package of projects to the council along with Mayor Tom Bates and Councilmember Gordon Wozniak, noted in a telephone interview on Thursday, that the doubling and tripling of rents has forced some businesses out of the area.

Gordon said a major factor causing vacancies is the city’s cumbersome permitting process. For example, his company owns a building on Telegraph Ave. and Dwight Way, where Peet’s plans to open a coffee shop. However, getting permits to change from the former use—a copy center—to a coffee shop will take about six months, he said.

Still, facilitating a property’s change in use should not open the flood gates to chain stores, said Councilmember Dona Spring, speaking to the possibility that a Walgreens might come into the Telegraph district.

“We need to encourage small, local, unique businesses,” she said.

Some said the decline in revenue on Telegraph Avenue—which, nevertheless, brings in $98 million per year, according to Bates—is due to the many panhandlers and people with mental health needs who populate the avenue. For that reason, “a lot of people are not comfortable shopping on Telegraph,” Bates said.

But Weinstein disagreed: “Telegraph is not that much worse,” but the scene may not be tolerated by the new generation of university students. Councilmember Laurie Capitelli said a higher income level among students might be at play.

Weinstein added that he sees open drug dealing near his store. He’s not only calling on the council to bring in more police, but he wants better policing methods. In the past, merchants had pager numbers for beat police and the mental health team, which would respond rapidly, he said. On the other hand, “The UC Police have never tried to make a connection,” he said.

Councilmember Linda Maio said the now-defunct Telegraph Area Association tried to link merchants, landlords and residents, but lost city funding to budget cuts several years ago.

The business improvement district has not filled the void, Weinstein said: “The BID represents interests of property owners.”

Some measures to help the area are under way: the city is working with UC Berkeley so that students can use their university debit cards with local merchants.

The question of adding two bike cops and a mental health team for the area will be part of next month’s budget decisions. The city is in the process of purchasing a “green machine” to clean Telegraph Avenue sidewalks.

By unanimous vote, councilmembers asked the city manager to report to them before the summer recess that begins mid-July on enhanced lighting, façade improvements and streamlining the permit process.

Tempers flared and jeers erupted Monday night at the first public meeting of the task force outlining the scope of a major private development on public land.

The occasion was the first public meeting of the South Berkeley Neighborhood Development Corporation’s (SBNDC) Ashby BART Task Force, the group charged by the city with setting the parameters for development on the station’s main parking lot.

The City Council endorsed a grant to fund the first stages of development of a mixed use housing and retail complex at the site in December, a move that has sparked anxiety in the nearby neighborhood.

The loudest opposition Monday—expressed in frequent yells and one drawn-out chant—came primarily from those who occupy the site, at least for two days a week, Berkeley Flea Market vendors and their supporters.

They, and some neighbors, said they were concerned that they’d been shut out of a process they suspected was careening towards a predetermined goal.

Once inside, they found little to reassure themselves.

The key participants were seated with their backs to the public, a point not lost on Osha Neumann, a civil rights attorney who is both an immediate neighbor of the project and the flea market’s legal representative.

“These people had their backs to us when we came in,” Neumann said during a comment period. “That is very strange.”

Ed Church, the professional development specialist hired to oversee the development, left the chairing duties to Taj Johns, a neighborhood liaison with the city manager’s office.

Earlier rally

Spectators were primed by the time they walked into the meeting, fired up during a rally outside the South Berkeley Senior Center that started a half hour before the task force’s scheduled 7 p.m. meeting inside.

Colorful signs adorned the sidewalk, and speaker after speaker rose either to defend the flea market or to denounce Mayor Tom Bates and City Councilmember Max Anderson—or both.

Two of the speakers, former Planning Commission Chair Zelda Bronstein and Zachary RunningWolf, have announced their candidacies for mayor, and both had harsh things to say about the incumbent.

“We’ve lost control of city government,” said Bronstein. “It’s as if we don’t exist.”

“We really need to put the brakes on this,” said RunningWolf, predicting the proposed project would doom the political careers of Bates and Anderson.

Andrea Pritchett of Copwatch and Community Services United, the umbrella group of local nonprofits that sponsors the popular weekend market, acted as chair of the rally.

The event even featured a song, with singer and guitarist Mas-Allah belting out his “Flea Market Blues.”

Nancy Threatt, a neighbor, said she was concerned about the makeup of the task force. “It should be folks from census tract 4240—right over there,” she said. “I have trouble with people from all over.”

“We’re going to end up like Emeryville,” said Dean Smith, an artist and project neighbor. “Development has run amok, and it is happening here, with Mayor Bates and our councilman, Max Anderson, who is basically selling down the river.”

Election

Another board move raised more questions, with the Johns announcement that a group of task force members had meet in private Saturday to design the shape of Monday night’s meeting.

“Why weren’t we told?” yelled one member of the audience, a question immediately taken up by others.

Then came the election of officers—co-chairs as it turned out—in action that ended almost as soon as it began with Berkeley Unified School District board member John Selawsky nominating himself and proposing that co-chairs be installed, at least initially.

Selawsky reeled off a list of his qualifications as chair and member of various civic bodies, to be followed to the microphone by Toya Groves, who said she had no leadership experience, proposing herself as co-chair.

A resident of Blake Street in West Berkeley, Selawsky isn’t a project neighbor. Groves, however, is.

“I nominate Osha Neumann,” came a yell from the audience, winning immediate cheers from others in the boisterous crowd, who were still facing the backs of the task force.

“I accept,” said Neumann.

“How many want Osha Neumann to be chair?” yelled Kenoli Oleari, a critic of the project from its inception.

More cheers followed.

But, as Neumann later told the audience, the would-be candidate had declined to serve on the task force “because I wouldn’t sign a loyalty oath” saying he endorsed the process, which had been formalized at a December City Council meeting.

“The volunteers should be co-chairs,” said task force member Dan Cloak.

And with that, Selawsky and Groves were installed—though Johns continued to run the meeting, the new officers to take effect at the group’s next session.

More chaos

Johns then charged into first of the two items listed on the meeting’s half-sheet agenda—setting ground rules and a talk by a BART official.

She added one more topic: “topics from the audience” for the task force to address, which would be discussed in subgroups and then reported on at the group’s regular meetings.

“Why didn’t we have any input?” yelled Oleari. “We want to talk about the process,” yelled another audience member.

“We can’t do this like this,” responded Johns, only to be greeted by another cacophony of yells, followed by the prolonged chanting of “Open it up and shut it down!”

An elderly woman from the audience picked up the microphone and declared, “I want to hear both sides.” With a little more prompting, and an assist from another woman in the audience, she managed to quiet the crowd, at least for a moment.

Johns then opened the mics to the audience, giving speakers a minute each to offer suggested rules. But most comments were criticisms of the project, and on Johns herself—with Pritchett accusing her of lying at one point, and earning the response, “I walked with integrity in this world. I am not lying.”

Robert Lauriston, a neighborhood land use activist and creator of the Nabart.com website which features more up-to-date project information than the SBNDC’s Southberkeley.org site (where the last posting was March 17 as of Wednesday evening), called on the task force to sever ties with the SBNDC.

“No organization or profession should be privileged,” Lauriston said.

Comments

While many said they wanted nothing new at the site, others said they supported a project on the station’s main parking lot—provided many of the units are reserved for those with low incomes.

Any project should have space for the flea market, any housing built should have a large proportion permanently reserved for low-income people, and the project should include areas available for community use, said John Warren, director of Unconditional Theatre and a member of the AshbyArts District.

Steve Gold of the LeConte Neighborhood association seconded Warren’s suggestion, “but we really need to do it right.”

Karen Hilton was more skeptical, declaring—as would others—that the project should be move out of a racially mixed neighborhood, where it would only result in further gentrification, and be placed instead at the North Berkeley BART station.

Marge Wilkinson agreed, saying she had moved to South Berkeley to live in an integrated working class neighborhood.

“The task force here hasn’t been on the up-and-up,” said Erica Cleary, a Prince Street neighborhood activist. “The task force has a chance of doing something good, but the only way is if they separate from the SBNDC and the project manager and take the reins. Wouldn’t that be wonderful.”

Near the end, Johns literally pulled the plug on Oleari after he ignored her “time is up” admonitions and she reached down and disconnected his microphone.

BART’s agenda

Jeffrey Ordway, BART’s manager of project development, almost didn’t get to speak, until the audience critics reluctantly agreed to suspend the comment period following a show of hands vote that Johns said “looks like a tie to me.”

In the 1960s, Ordway said, BART isolated its stations by surrounding them with asphalt parking lots “on the assumption that you only got to them by auto.”

The agency is now trying to reverse the practice, both to integrate all its stations into their communities and to raise more funds for the agency so it can reduce public subsidies.

He said BART is returning to a strategy adopted by railroads in the 19th Century, when they created developments around their stations.

An added benefit for local governments is that by allowing private development, BART puts the property back on the tax rolls. By encouraging housing and retail uses, additional car trips are reduced and alternative transportation use is encouraged.

After a shouted question from the audience, however, he acknowledged that some questions remain about the air rights over the Ashby BART lot, an issue Johns promised to explore with the city.

Those rights, claimed by the city, control development at heights more than 10 feet over the lot.

Another comment period followed, with little new said, but lots of it.

Future meets

Selawsky and Groves are scheduled to take the helm for the next task force meeting, scheduled for June 5. Another session has been booked for the 19th, and more will be scheduled later, according to a flyer distributed before the meeting.

A group of Laney College students received an unpleasant surprise in the mail earlier this month: a notice that because of budget problems, the Laney College Children’s Center was closing its infant and toddler day care program effective the end of this school year.

On Tuesday night, anguished student-parents crowded the Peralta Community College Board of Trustees meeting, complaining about the last-minute nature of the notice, and several saying that without day care facilities for their children they would probably have to drop out of college themselves.

Taisha Jefferson, a full-time Laney College single-parent student with a 22-month-old daughter at the Laney Children’s Center, told trustees, “My academic progress wouldn’t have been possible” without the center.

And Maha Allen, whose infant will not be able to attend the center next year because of the closing, said, “The timing of the notification letter was particularly bad,” coming as it did in the middle of finals.

She added that “this was a really stressful week for us.”

And Mahasin Moon, a San Francisco State student whose children began attending the children’s center when Moon was attending Laney College, called the services at the center “incredibly important to the community. The community college is eliminating our community.”

Moon and several of the other parents are members of the Children’s Center Parent Advisory Committee, an independent group which Moon later said has raises between $800 and $1,200 a year to support center activities, including sponsoring graduation ceremonies and cultural celebrations.

Several of the parents praised the operations at the center itself, one of them saying that “my child never cries when I take her to the center. She only cries when I come there to take her home. She’s having so much fun. The activities and the programs there are fantastic.”

Because the item was not on the trustees agenda Tuesday night, trustees could not discuss the matter, or even ask Peralta administrators for clarification.

On Thursday morning, Peralta officials were meeting with a group of the affected student-parents to try to work out a solution. Peralta officials admitted that they have been working on the potential closures for a year, and said that the failure to notify the affected parents until a few weeks before the end of the semester was a “mistake.”

Linda Mitchell, who has directed the Laney College Children’s Center for 13 years, said that while she knew that the infant program was scheduled to be closed at the end of this year and had informed parents, she was not informed of the toddler closing herself until “a month and a half ago.”

The Laney College Children’s Center is located on East 10th Street next door to the Laney College Football Stadium and across the street from the Oakland Unified School District Administration Building, in the suddenly-hot potential commercial-residential development zone bordering the Lake Merritt Channel that connects the lake to the estuary.

It currently serves 48 children between 3 and 5 years old, 16 toddlers between 2 and 3 years old, and 11 infants under 2 years old. While the parents of many of the center’s children are Laney College students, the center is open to the general public for enrollment.

The 3-5 year old portion of the center’s activities will not be affected by the proposed toddler and infant closures.

Although the center is not exclusively a low-income facility, many of its programs are geared towards that section of the community, and several of the parents said they were receiving state subsidies in order to keep their children in the program.

In her notification to parents, Peralta Children’s Center Site Manager Danielle Waite said that the ongoing 3-5 year old program at the centers “has spaces with our Child Development Contract for low-income families, which remains free or low cost … We are going to prioritize student families over working families beginning Fall 2006, not the lowest income.”

Shortly after parents received the notification letter of the closings on May 11, the Parent Advisory Committee sent out an email to parents and Peralta trustees, saying in part that “low-income families are the most vulnerable of Laney’s population. It would be a travesty to remove a working program that has changed so many lives, and aided in the access of higher education and upward mobility for so many families over the years.”

Advisory Committee member Moon said in a telephone interview that committee members later met with Peralta Trustee Alona Clifton, who “said she had no idea that the cuts were going on.”

Peralta Vice Chancellor Margaret Haig told trustees Tuesday night that the closures were necessary because of mounting deficits of Peralta’s three children’s centers, including Laney, College of Alameda, and Merritt College. Haig said that the centers lost $100,000 in fiscal year 2003, $200,000 in fiscal year 2004, and were projecting a $400,000 deficit in the current fiscal year.

During the meeting with student-parents on Thursday morning, she blamed the mounting deficits on a mandatory state-required student-teacher ratio that did not allow the centers to cut costs by cutting staff, as well as the demand by Service Employees International Union 790 to get rid of Peralta’s hourly worker program, including workers at the child care centers.

Haig explained that Peralta did not have to pay health care costs for the hourly workers, but with those workers becoming permanent employees, she said that health care costs at the child care centers are skyrocketing.

Haig also said that the child care centers were under a mandate from the Peralta Board of Trustees to make the child care centers pay for themselves out of fees and direct state subsidies, without money coming out of the Peralta district budget.

Haig also promised that center and district officials would work with individual parents to get state day care subsidies and to have their children placed in other child care facilities.

Despite that promise, Haig and Danielle Waite, site manager for the district’s three children’s centers, came under withering criticism from participants at Thursday morning’s meeting, including Laney Academic Senate President Evelyn Lord.

Saying that “Laney College has been shut out of this process until now” and that “I am highly offended that I wasn’t brought into this issue earlier,” Lord said that “if you had brought Laney College in on this problem from the beginning, I believe we would have come up with a solution by now.”

She also criticized district and college priorities, saying “why do we have a college football team while we are closing down parts of our child care center? Why are we hiring more people in the district headquarters when we say we don’t have enough money to hire day care teachers? It doesn’t make sense.” Lord suggested that the Peralta Foundation be approached to “keep the infants and toddlers program floating for a while until we can come up with a permanent solution.”

With Lord and the parents stating that they wanted to work on finding alternate funding to supplement the center’s activities, Haig and Waite agreed to hold a followup meeting in July, with Haig promising to include SEIU Local 790 officials as well as Peralta Chief Financial Officer Tom Smith.

Andrew Martinez’s funeral was Thursday, but a memorial will be held Saturday at 1 p.m. in People’s Park.

As news of his suicide in his Santa Clara County jail cell last week spread, the one image that kept coming up in the minds of those who knew him best was Martinez, known as The Naked Guy, dancing to the tune of “Break on Through to the Other Side!” on his handheld tape player at the 1992 September Nude In at Sproul Hall.

“There was such a sense of calm, of control in Andy,” she said. “It’s shocking to see how society moved him to a deeper and deeper level of isolation.”

Moore remembers Martinez wanting to renounce living in tiny cell-like rooms, pollution, cars and “concrete eating up the world” of plants.

“He pitched a tent and took on the daily task of demolishing the concrete driveway at The Chateau—the Berkeley housing co-op he lived in at one point—with a sledge hammer and pick ax so that it could return to a garden,” she said.

Moore said that it was actions like these and many more which led Andrew to be labeled as crazy.

“I used to have conversations with him even after he left Berkeley to go back to Cupertino to live with his family,” she said. “In his voice I heard frustration, I heard agony for the endless psychiatric sessions he had to go through, the social norms he had to follow.”

Betsy Putnam, housing supervisor for the University Students Cooperative Association in Berkeley, remembers Andrew as a “perfectly nice person” when he lived there in 1996.

“I saw no problem in him in the year and a summer that he lived here,” she said. “He paid rent naked and kept his wallet in his backpack. But then, how can you possibly tell, we have 1,200 students living here at the same time.”

Dan McMullan, a Berkeley activist for the Disabled People Outside project, recalled Martinez as a principled person with definite ideas.

“He had an expression of freedom that nobody had seen in Berkeley for a long time,” he said. “People from all over the world come to Berkeley to see interesting people, and Andrew Martinez was one of those people.”

McMullan himself was jailed in solitary confinement in Santa Rita Jail for four months. “It was hell,” he says. “I cannot imagine Andy with his mental condition having to go through solitary confinement. All I did in that cell was pace around all day. I even started to hear voices. Frankly, if I had a plastic bag like Andy had had I too wouldn’t be here today.”

A private criminal attorney in Santa Clara County, who did not want to be named and who currently has a client in maximum security solitary confinement at the Santa Clara County Main Jail, described solitary confinement conditions as “simply horrible.”

The attorney said that the other county jail in Elmwood was where all the “well-behaved” criminals were taken. In the “farmlike” atmosphere of Elmwood which is lower in security, inmates can be closer to the outside world.

“The rest, mentally ill or not, end up in the main jail. If you have someone who is not behaving properly, the corrections people can make it really difficult for them. I don’t think it is a good place for the mentally ill. No one can prove these problems because there are no witnesses. Although mental patients are kept separately on the second floor which is devoted to the medical care, it is not good to be mentally ill and be in jail. Our justice system is just not equipped for it,” she said.

Nancy Brewer, spoksperson for Santa Clara County’s Public Defender’s office, declined to comment on Andrew Martinez’s case but spoke about cases similar to Martinez in general.

“It all depends on how mentally ill the person is,” she said. “Sometimes the person is taken to EPS—a special unit for severely mentally ill people—or to a mental institution. And if they recover and are found to be competent enough they are brought back for trial. But mental illness and competency are two very different things. If a person is mentally ill and competent to testify, he will be kept in the main jail.”

Jennifer Bodollo, public defender for Martinez in Santa Clara County, declined comment on her client out of respect for Martinez’s family.

Ann Kring, professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, told the Planet that there has been a rising trend over the past ten to twenty years for more and more mentally ill people to land up in jail instead of mental institutions.

“Often homeless people end up in jail regardless of whether or not they have committed a crime,” she said. “Being mentally ill and a criminal is a tricky situation. In the case that you are mentally ill and are kept in solitary confinement while awaiting trial, the illness can grow. Very few jails in the U.S. are adequately equipped for mental care. They are understaffed and underfacilitated and it is difficult to understand when an inmate will commit suicide. It is not even a good idea to have something like a plastic bag in a cell room which is housing a mentally ill patient.”

Kring added that as a society we needed to do a much better job of taking care of mental patients who end up in jail. “Unless society is willing to step up there will be more cases like Andrew Martinez. It is sad that in the year 2006, the best we can do for our mentally ill prisoners is simply put them in jail.”

Students are set to vote in the Berkeley High School elections Wednesday, but a communications snafu is casting a shadow over the democratic process.

Several students who submitted late applications are running as write-in candidates and must receive a two-thirds majority vote to win, though they were led to believe a deadline extension meant they would qualify for the ballot.

Members of the Associated Student Body (ASB), composed of the schoolwide president, vice president, the student school board representative and a handful of other student officials, voted to allow students who missed an April 21 deadline to submit applications as late as May 5, but only as write-in candidates.

The idea was to allow for a larger candidate pool, said ASB President Amy Yoshitsu, but Communication Arts and Sciences (CAS) English and communications teacher Phil Halpern fears that rule excludes some students, students who may not feel comfortable standing up for themselves.

“My role is as an adult advocate for students who want involvement in the political process,” he said. “Power can feel exclusive and participation doesn’t come easily.”

Now, he is incurring the wrath of student government representatives who say their autonomy to conduct student elections under attack.

“[The teacher] does not have the authority to change the elections,” said student school board director Teal Miller, who is in charge of running elections. “It’s a student decision.”

The ASB decision affects a handful of students (five to eight by Miller’s count), many who attend CAS, a small school within the comprehensive high school that does not enjoy the same student government representation as the larger school.

Halpern has interacted very little with the students—they are all juniors, and he teaches ninth, 10th and 12th-graders—but he is slated to become co-lead teacher of CAS next year, and sees himself as a champion for kids at CAS.

The students are running for spots on School Site Council, the Berkeley Schools Excellence Project (BSEP) Committee and the Berkeley Board of Education, seats generally considered more powerful than ASB or grade-level positions, because they deal with larger school and district policies.

Olivia Cueva, a junior, is running for student school board director, but doesn’t foresee victory, because her odds of receiving a two-thirds majority vote as a write-in are slim.

“I don’t think it’s fair to extend the deadline and then put us on a write-ins,” she said. “I really wanted to do this, because CAS isn’t represented in student leadership.”

ASB members modeled the extension after general state elections, Miller said.

Halpern wants to hold a meeting today (Friday) with all students involved, in a last ditch effort to get kids on the ballot, but it may be too late. The ballots were already drawn up, Miller said.

“We welcome suggestions on how to run a better election. However, for this year, things are in place and we can’t make changes now,” she said.

Mateo Aceves, a contender for student board director, whose name will appear on the ballot, contests the ASB decision, but on different grounds from his opponent Cueva. He thinks the deadline shouldn’t have been extended at all.

“To me, the process seems like a sham,” he said. “If you guys want political legitimacy, you can’t just change the rules.”

More than 200 Spanish-speaking parents and students received calls from Berkeley schools late last month, urging students to attend school May 1 or suffer consequences.

Parents of students at both high schools and two middle schools received the automated calls the weekend before May 1, when millions flooded the streets in a nationwide boycott to honor immigrants’ rights. The calls were conducted in Spanish and exclusively honed in on Latino families.

Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) spokesperson Mark Coplan denied that the district office had any involvement in the calls. He said the calls originated at Longfellow and King middle schools and the Berkeley Alternative High School (BAHS). Some students at Berkeley High also received calls because they have siblings at those schools, Coplan said.

Neither King Principal Kit Pappenheimer nor Longfellow Principal Rebecca Cheung returned calls for comment. One of the BAHS guidance counselors apparently initiated the calls to about 10 Alternative High families, Coplan said.

The message told parents that school administrators understood students wanted to participate in the boycott, but that the school would not condone such behavior. Parents were urged to discuss May Day events with their children, and told that teachers would hold similar discussions in school. The message also said there would be consequences for students who leave school.

The same message went out to all the Spanish-speaking families, said BUSD Admissions and Attendance Manager Francisco Martinez.

Liliana Zazueta, who has children at Berkeley High and Longfellow, claims she received two disparate messages. The one from Longfellow was neutral, she said; it acknowledged that parents might want to pull their children out of school, but that the school did not think it was a good idea.

The Berkeley High School message was more ominous, Zazueta said. It threatened to lower her son’s grades if he missed school. Her son, a 10th-grader, skipped school, anyway. Recently he received a poor progress report, though Zazueta doesn’t know if it’s linked to his absence May 1.

One ninth-grader at Berkeley High, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said his father received a call that said if his son went to school May 1 then left, there would be serious consequences. The student attended school, even though most of his friends did not, because “I was afraid of what might happen if I went to a protest,” he said.

Miguel, another Berkeley High School student who did not want to release his full name because of potential repercussions, claims the message he received said he would not graduate, walk the stage or participate in prom if he missed school May 1.

Martinez resolutely denies that any other messages went out. He keeps a log of all messages, through the district’s time-based notification system, the NTI Group, Inc., which allows school site administrators to record messages and distribute them to specific groups, like parents who might vote in PTA elections or attend a Back to School Night.

Some contend that calls which targeted Spanish-speaking families and not other immigrants—even though the boycott honored all immigrants—were discriminatory.

“Isolating one part of the population, that sounds like discrimination,” said Berkeley High School history teacher Jody Sokolower. “If that’s not racism, I don’t know what is.”

Superintendent Michele Lawrence would not comment on the specific incidents, but said, “It may well have been something that, if you’re going to inform kids, you need to inform all kids,” though she added that the principals were probably looking out for the safety of their students.

The news comes on the heels of reports that the school district docked the pay of teachers who attended rallies May 1, prompting some to accuse the district of fostering an atmosphere of intimidation against immigrants.

“It’s kind of paternalistic,” said Marcela Taylor, a Spanish, history and English language learner teacher who heads up Berkeley High’s La Raza club. “I’m not surprised that there are students and parents who feel threatened.”

Public financing of election campaigns is one way to shield public officials from the influence of big money. But when the question of placing a measure on Berkeley’s November ballot calling for public financing for all local elected offices came before the City Council Tuesday, councilmembers hesitated.

In a 7-0-2 vote, with Councilmembers Linda Maio and Max Anderson abstaining, the council decided not to take immediate action, but recommended to the city’s Fair Campaign Practices Commission a ballot measure that would allow candidates for the mayor’s job—and not other posts—to voluntarily participate in a publicly-funded campaign.

The FCPC will address the issue at its June meeting and report back to the council, which then could vote to put a “clean money” measure on the ballot.

Much of the hesitation comes from the experience of the election two years ago in which a similar proposal lost, winning only 41 percent of the vote. Some councilmembers said it was too soon to try again.

“The voters gave us a message,” Councilmember Laurie Capitelli said.

Saying that she was worried about “voter fatigue,” Councilmember Linda Maio, said she supports the measure in principle, but that this year’s November ballot is too packed to include this one.

Councilmember Kriss Worthington, however, argued that it is timely to support a ballot measure that would affect all local candidates: Jack Abramoff’s corruption has been well publicized; a state-wide “clean money” initiative will likely be on the November ballot, and the local League of Women Voters is backing the measure. (The organization did not participate two years ago because they thought the measure would be lost among the many local bond issues on the ballot.)

Councilmember Darryl Moore said public financing is important “for many of us, people of modest means.” It allows “participation of people of color [and] begins to level the playing field,” he said. “Let our voters in Berkeley decide.”

Capitelli said he was most concerned about the cost, estimated by proponents at $300,000 to $450,000 per year, using funds that could otherwise be spent on projects such as a youth center or affordable housing. (The proposal to fund only the mayor’s race would cost the city considerably less.)

Besides, Capitelli said “We don’t have any Jack Abramoffs in Berkeley.”

The council also decided to ask the Planning Commission to write an ordinance by November, allowing people to rebuild “habitable structures” after a disaster exactly where the destroyed structure had been. The new building would not exceed the height and square-footage of the former structure.

“These provisions should apply to everyone in Berkeley, including properties with open creeks,” said former Mayor Shirley Dean, speaking at the public comment period before the council meeting.

Councilmember Dona Spring, who would have preferred an ordinance that causes people to rebuild away from creeks, said in a phone interview Thursday that “unfortunately,” the proposed law would not include exceptions to preserve creeks.

Rebuilding structures close to creeks will be permitted, unless modern-day engineering standards cannot be met, she said.

Both Spring and Councilmember Kriss Worthington called on the council to support the recommendation as it had been originally written—specifying its application only to homes.

Their motion was defeated and the council voted 8-1, with Worthington in opposition, to support rebuilding in place for all “habitable structures.”

Energy choice

Saying it was premature, the City Council turned down a proposal to put an advisory measure on the November ballot supporting Community Choice Aggregation, through which several cities would get together to run their own energy company.

The council is still waiting for a complete report on CCA feasibility, which will not be ready until February or March of next year.

Urging the council to move forward with CCA, environmentalist Tom Kelly wrote the council: “As a Community Choice District, we can help to make that transition from dirty, polluting sources of energy to sources that are clean and healthy.”

The vote against putting CCA on the November ballot was 8-1-1, with Councilmember Dona Spring abstaining and Councilmember Kriss Worthington voting in opposition.

Bikes on sidewalks

By unanimous vote, the council lowered the fine for bike riders riding on sidewalks from $278 to $53, changing the violation from a misdemeanor to an infraction.

A recent Stanford grad, Christian Pecaut, 25, is ready to change the world. He wants to start as Berkeley’s next mayor.

In fact, Pecaut moved to Berkeley from San Francisco a couple of weeks ago with the express purpose of running for office. He joins a growing field of challengers to Mayor Tom Bates that includes former Planning Commissioner Zelda Bronstein, Zachary Runningwolf and Richard Berkeley.

Pecaut says he’ll take out organizational papers for mayor as soon as he gets confirmation of his new Berkeley voter registration from the Registrar of Voters office.

One of the top issues in Pecaut’s campaign will be the eradication of homelessness. He says he’s putting together a plan focused on attacking the heart of the problem—getting the Republicans out of office—as well as improving services for homeless in the short term.

Pecaut has been to Homeless Commission meetings and says he has friends among the homeless community. He points to “various indignities inflicted” on that population, including being offered “unsanitary showers.”

Calling program directors “profiteers of poverty,” Pecaut notes that in the proposed 2006-2007 budget, nonprofit organizations that fund services for the homeless using city funds will receive a 3 percent augmentation without a review of services delivered.

Asked questions about potholes, library management and the storm drain system, Pecaut concedes that he is a novice to the nuts and bolts of city governance.

“I don’t have the exact details of why the potholes are not fixed,” he said, noting, however, “I’m learning very quickly.”

Local needs can be met, he said: “All the problems seem to be manageable.”

While Pecaut plans to learn more about the details of city governance, he says the real problem is government “unresponsiveness.” Pointing to developers, he said: “The citizens know what the problems are. City government seems to cozy up to [developer] interests.”

Pecaut says he is not employed at present. Instead of working, he will concentrate on running his campaign. Most recently he has managed the campaign of Green Party hopeful Carol Brouillet for the 14th Congressional District on the Peninsula. He says he will continue to consult for Brouillet.

Local problems can be resolved by addressing national issues, especially getting rid of the Republican administration, he said. The problem is the “constant threat of terror” being put forward by the Republicans, he said.

“It’s almost all false, but people are so terrified they can’t focus on other issues,” Pecaut said, adding that he is heartened by the City Council’s recent resolution in favor of impeaching the president and vice-president.

“I will permanently remove the Republican Party from power in the United States for setting up 9/11,” Pecaut says on his website, www.berkeleymayor.org.

Willa Klug Baum, an internationally respected oral historian, passed away on May 18, 2006, following back surgery. Her pioneering work in oral history methodology and interview techniques served as the foundation for the establishment and growth of oral history as a unique academic discipline.

Born in Chicago on Oct. 4, 1926, Willa’s unconventional childhood included schooling in Germany and Switzerland before settling in Ramona, a small town in southern California. Her youthful interests included tap dance performances with her sister Gretchen and contributing to the local newspaper as a social reporter.

She attended Whittier College, studying history under Professor Paul Smith, who once made the galling (to her) comment that Willa was his second-best student ever, after Richard Nixon.

Willa paid for college by working as a telephone operator during the summer, and by winning an annual academic scholarship as the department’s top student. Upon graduation Willa received a scholarship offer from Mills College in Oakland to study history. After obtaining a master’s degree from Mills, Willa accepted a scholarship from UC Berkeley to pursue a Ph.D. in U.S. history, one of only two women in the program at the time.

In her second year of graduate school, Willa married Paul Baum, a fellow Berkeley Ph.D. student and they settled in Berkeley. After the births of the first two of their children, Paul became ill so Willa began working full-time to support the family, teaching English as a second language to adults and transcribing interviews.

Around this time, Professor James D. Hart, who later became the director of the Bancroft Library, began using Hubert Howe Bancroft’s dictations of interviews that had been conducted in the 1860s and 1870s. Dr. Hart asked UC Berkeley’s president, Robert Gordon Sproul, why the university was not capturing the stories of those living today who had been a part of history.

President Sproul agreed to allocate money to do so and the oral history project at UC Berkeley was born, becoming the second major university program in oral history at the time, the first being Allan Nevins’ project at Columbia.

Corrine Lathrop Gilb, a fellow graduate student of Willa’s, was hired to set up the program in 1954 and she in turn hired Willa. The goal was to set up something like what Hubert Howe Bancroft had done long ago, when he sent out interviewers to record in longhand the accounts of pioneers, silver kings, and others who shaped the West.

Starting as a transcriber and research assistant, Willa was officially appointed in 1955 as an interviewer and editor specializing in the fields of agriculture and water development. When Gilb left in 1958, Willa became the director of the project, a position she held until her retirement in 2000.

By 1966, Willa and Paul had five children and Willa was employed full-time at the Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) as it was now called. Willa loved being involved in oral history, not only because the work was important, but because it allowed her to meet people of the highest caliber and interview them about the events and issues they felt most passionately about.

Through her interviews at ROHO, Willa got to know Earl Warren, Golda Meir, and Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, David Brower and many others. She prided herself on being clever enough to hire a group of top notch women interviewers, each an expert in her field, who “wanted something intelligent to do.”

During the 1960s and much of the 1970s, Willa and Paul were well known in Berkeley circles for having both a large (ultimately six children) and an intact family. In the Who’s Who of American Women, Willa’s avocation is listed as “childrearing.”

In addition to working full-time and raising six children, Willa also taught English to adult foreign-born students, and she could often be found leading a classroom of Chinese and Japanese immigrants in a silly English song.

After she and Paul divorced in 1980, Willa began a tradition of weekly dinners at her North Berkeley Julia Morgan-designed home, at which one could always find an eclectic variety of academic and cultural luminaries engaged in stimulating conversation and dining.

She also rented out spare bedrooms to foreign students who had come to Berkeley to study English, rendering her large home an ethnic and social melting pot in the classic Berkeley tradition. Fundraisers and solicitors, particularly those pursuing environmental causes, knew Willa as a “soft touch,” always willing to make a donation.

Willa was also instrumental in establishing oral history as an accepted discipline by working with colleagues from around the country to develop professional standards and methodologies. She was a founding member of the Oral History Association, and although Willa published numerous books and anthologies on the topic of oral history, her 1969 publication titled Oral History for the Local Historical Society, is still considered a fundamental primer on establishing an oral history program.

In her typical self-deprecating style, Willa often remarked that she only wrote the book because she was tired of being asked to give the same speech again and again.

Under Willa’s directorship, ROHO amassed over 1,600 oral histories, filled with first-hand accounts of the participants in significant historical events primarily in California and the West. These permanent eyewitness accounts of history are on deposit at over 800 libraries worldwide, and stand as an invaluable resource to researchers worldwide.

ROHO established a reputation of being ahead-of-the-curve in identifying and documenting historical movements; for example, ROHO’s Suffragists and Women in Politics series began in the early 1970’s before most campuses had women’s studies programs. Similarly, ROHO’s early documentation of the disability rights movement now provides primary research materials for the new disability studies program at UC Berkeley.

Upon her retirement, Willa was bestowed the Berkeley Citation for her service to UC Berkeley, the President’s Citation for her contributions to the University of California, and the Hubert Howe Bancroft Award for her leadership of ROHO.

Willa is survived by her sister, Gretchen Klug of Oakland, five children, Marc Baum of San Francisco, Eric Baum of Santa Monica, Rachel Baum Bogard of Nevada, Brandon Baum of Palo Alto and Anya Davis of Los Angeles, seven grandchildren, and her beloved housekeeper and companion, Shirley Williams of Berkeley. She was preceded in death by her son Noah and her former husband, Paul.

A memorial is planned for June 4, 2006 at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Ave. at 2:00 p.m. (call 845-8725 for more information). Donations can be sent to the Willa K. Baum endowment for oral history, care of the Regional Oral History Office.

A power surge swept through the East Bay Tuesday, knocking out electrical service to 21,000 customers in Berkeley, Albany, Kensington, El Cerrito and Richmond and leaving one hapless Berkeley resident trapped in an elevator.

Deputy Fire Chief David Orth said the surge kept Berkeley emergency responders busy after the pulse hit the city moments before 4 p.m.

“It blacked out the north end of the city from Cedar Street north and the hills up to Spruce Street,” Orth said.

A resident of the apartment building at 2747 Haste St. was trapped in an elevator by the surge, prompting a call to the Fire Department. Power was not knocked out to the area, but the surge stalled the lift, and firefighters reset the system, enabling the trapped resident to complete their ride.

“PG&E still doesn’t know what caused the outage,” said Orth.

It also triggered numerous alarm systems.

The outage’s impacts were worse in El Cerrito and Richmond, he said. The surge knocked out power to a key computer system at the El Cerrito emergency dispatch system, and the California Highway Patrol was receiving emergency calls via cell phone.

Most customers had their power restored by 9:30 p.m., he said.

Cottage fire

Careless handling of his smokes by a homeless person was the apparent cause of the early morning fire that caused $5,000 in damage to a vacant cottage at the rear of a similarly vacant home at 1839 Berkeley Way Thursday, Orth said.

A caller reported smoke at the property at 4:23 a.m.; a call of flames followed within minutes.

Fire fighters arrived to find flames burning the floor of the dwelling, with the homeless squatter still in residence.

The flames were quickly extinguished and the illegal occupant was taken into custody by police on suspicion of trespassing, Orth said.

Berkeley police were called to UC Berkeley Tang Center, where a young woman had been admitted reporting that she had been sexually assaulted.

When officers sought more information, the woman refused to talk to them, said Berkeley police spokesperson Ed Galvan.

Because the incident happened on university property, the investigation was handed over to university police, he said.

May 6

Four young men, at least one of them armed with a pistol, robbed a 19-year-old of his backpack and cell phone as he was walking near the corner of Sacramento and Prince streets moments after midnight.

Two young men, ages 10 to 15, staged the strong-arm robbery of another youth, age 15, in the 300 block of Deakin Street just after 10 p.m.

The two bandits departed with the other youngster’s wallet.

May 7

A Berkeley woman called police at 11:49 p.m. to report that she had just been robbed by a gunman in his 20’s who piled his black pistol on her as she was walking in the 2400 block of Durant Avenue.

Seven minutes later, a 23-year-old man called to report that two young men in a silver Pontiac Trans Am had pulled a gun on him as he was walking in the 1900 block of Stuart Street and stolen a black book that contained his personal identification papers.

May 8

Police were summoned to the U-Haul officer at 2100 San Pablo at 5:49 p.m. after two women went postal inside the store, throwing things about and hurling a stapler at the clerk.

The pair was last seen running northbound on San Pablo.

Police have identified one of the pair as an Oakland woman, but no arrests have been made, said Officer Galvan.

May 9

Two bandits grabbed a 19-year-old UC Berkeley student from behind and threw her to the ground as she was standing at the bus stop at the corner of Dana and Haste Streets ay 2:37 a.m.

The robbers made off with a backpack containing her laptop computer and several textbooks.

May 10

At 10:21 a.m., Berkeley police were called to the sidewalk outside the Walgreen’s Drugs at 2187 Shattuck Ave., where a Willard Middle School student reported that another youngster had punched him in the head during an aborted robbery attempt.

The young bandit had high-tailed it before officers arrived.

At 3:31 p.m., police rushed to the corner of Ellis and Fairview streets after an 18-year-old woman was struck in the head with a tire iron allegedly wielded by a 20-year-old Union City woman.

The injured woman then grabbed a pair of knives and ran after her attacked, but dropped the knives—which the suspect picked up and carried off as she fled.

The injured woman was taken to an emergency room for treatment. No arrests have been made, said Officer Galvan.

May 13

A 50-year-old Berkeley man called police to report that someone shot at him as he was driving in the 2100 block of Eighth Street at 12:16 a.m.

The man, who received minor injuries from flying glass, said he had no idea who shot at him or why.

Resident of Hearst Avenue called police at 10:35 p.m. to report that a man was swinging a club at passersby in Ohlone Park near the corner of Hearst and Sacramento Street.

Police found one man who had been struck but not seriously injured, and another woman who had been attacked.

They also found the bat-man, a 25-year-old man with serious mental problems. He was taken away for psychiatric observation.

May 15

Police arrested a 29-year-old homeless man for attacking another homeless man, age 52, with a cane in the 1900 block of Center Street, just a short walk from the city lockup.

May 17

An 18-year-old Berkeley woman called police to report that the night before, she had been confronted by a menacing man uttering threats who convinced her to hand over her purse after he approached her near the corner of Durant and Telegraph Avenues.

At 5:41 p.m., a pharmacist at United Pharmacy at 2929 Telegraph Ave. called officers to report that a gunman had just left the store, making off with narcotics the clerk had handed over after the gunman threatened to pistol-whip him.

A 54-year-old Berkeley man called police at 6:27 p.m., moments one of three young would-be carjackers who confronted him in the 1600 block of Woolsey Street, struck him with a pistol and tried to make off with his car.

The man kept his wheels, and a prompted response by police resident in the arrest of a 19-year-old Berkeley man, identified as the ringleader, on suspicion of attempted carjacking.

May 18

After hearing shouts and spotting a fight occurring nearby, callers told police at 8:35 p.m. that a fight was breaking out in the 2500 block of McGee Avenue.

Officers arrived to find that a group of young men had approached a couple as they were walking and grabbed the man’s wallet. He set out in pursuit, and managed to recover his wallet.

Officers found the suspects during a canvass of the area, but the robbed man, having recovered his wallet, declined to press charges against the youths.

A 24-year-old woman called police at 10:28 p.m. to report that a man professing to be packing a pistol had demanded her hot pink purse as she was walking near the corner of Durant Avenue and Ellsworth Street.

A search of the area turned up the purse, with most—but not all—of her belongings intact.

May 21

A 30-year-old Berkeley man was robbed of his c ash by a menacing teenager near the corner of Fairview and King Streets moments before 3 p.m.

May 22

A Berkeley woman called police at 8:45 p.m. to report that her 16-year-old daughter had just been sexually assaulted.

The young woman was rushed to an emergency room for treatment and examination, and police are looking for the suspect, who has been identified.

An 18-year old Oakland woman reported that a pair of strong-arm bandits had stolen her purse as she was walking near the corner of Russell Street and Telegraph Avenue about 1:40 a.m.

The pair departed in a white Honda Civic.

Three young bandits, ages about 13, robbed a 10-year-old of his belongings by landing a punch or two and threatening to add more shortly after 3:30 p.m. near the corner of Francisco Street and Franklin Avenue.

Offered medical aid, the young man decided to tough it out.

A gang of four women in their late teens beat a La Honda, CA, woman and stole her belongings near the corner of Regent and Russell streets just before 7:30 p.m.

The four were last seen fleeing in a green Toyota four-door. Their victim declined medical aid.

May 23

Two men in their 20s came up behind a Berkeley woman as she walked in the 2500 block of Ninth Street and demanded her purse at 12:45 a.m.

Their mission accomplished, he pair fled and was last seen running from the scene on Dwight Way.

At 99, Ruby Harmon still insists on a slice of crispy bacon, grits, and coffee for breakfast everyday. Her face breaks into a smile—a million tiny creases—when I ask her why.

Recovering from a series of recent strokes, Ruby can neither talk nor walk without support. Her mind, however, is as alert as ever. She tells me by scribbling painstakingly on my yellow legal pad that her favorite part of the day is when she sits down to work on her crossword and jigsaw puzzles.

Ruby turns 100 this Thursday, and her remarkable journey through life was celebrated by the Trinity United Methodist Church last Sunday.

“Friends, family, neighbors—they were all there to celebrate the indomitable spirit that is Ruby,” said Luanne Rogers, friend and a church trustee. “She is one of the most willing and able women I have ever known. She is capable of everything and has done it all in the name of social justice.”

If walking for miles for food and raising money for blankets to help her community after moving to California from Louisiana in 1943 wasn’t enough, Ruby served on every possible church committee—locally and at the district, state and national level for United Methodist Women—and was a lay preacher in the pulpits of churches in Vallejo, Pleasanton, Alameda, and Trinity.

She also volunteered in the Berkeley Unified School District for more than ten years and developed a Civil Rights cartoon collection that has been exhibited at Trinity, Pacific School of Religion, and the Berkeley Public Library.

These decades of dedication to the community are part of the reason the City of Berkeley will be proclaiming May 25, as Ruby Harmon Day today.

Ruby was the eldest of three children born to Jim Tom and Sally Philip Roberson in Arcadia, La.

“In my hometown Arcadia, my father held me by the hand when I would go to town with him,” she said. “And in the fall he would take his cotton into town to the merchants. And the one that paid the most, that’s the one he would sell his cotton to. And the sidewalk was narrow and if a white lady would come he had to step off the curb because he couldn’t get too close, a black man couldn’t get too close to a white lady in Louisiana, or in the south anywhere.”

In her conversations with Rogers in 1997, which were later transcribed for preservation, Ruby speaks of Civil Rights in Louisiana, the segregated school system and the integration that followed thereafter:

“You can’t believe the education they had for blacks in the south, or particularly in Louisiana,” Ruby said. “We didn’t have a high school in the whole parish until 1937 when they built a high school in Arcadia for blacks. All the blacks could do was go to seventh grade if they didn’t have money to go away somewhere to board.”

After arriving in California in 1943, she worked for Lockheed Aircraft and later moved to Berkeley and became a devoted volunteer in the Berkeley public schools, working to make sure that all students had a chance to succeed and continue their education.

Ruby completed her own studies at a boarding school in Grambling, La., which later went on to become Grambling University. In Ruby’s words, “When integration came, Arcadia immediately integrated. I was surprised at that redneck hick town. They tore down that white high school across town and built Arcadia High School and the black high school that was built on parish land became a training school for anybody who wanted a trade.”

She remembers being surprised by the changes she witnessed when she went down to Louisiana for her nieces’ graduation from the first integrated school.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “I sit up and look around and on the platform were two white teachers and two black teachers. The main speaker was a black professor from Grambling University. And the high school band of about 40 was mixed, white and black. The conductor was black and he had jazz in there and white people were playing that jazz. And ooh the white girls and white boys were playing that jazz and I couldn’t believe my ears! I looked around and said, ‘Is this Arcadia? This couldn’t be Arcadia.’

The white ladies that my father used to step off the curb for, their grandchildren were playing with his grandchildren. They had their arms around each other’s necks and they were dancing together and they would even take a piece off my plate and stick it in their mouth—integrated and I couldn’t believe it, in Arcadia.”

In these transcriptions, Ruby also talked about her great grandfather, who was one of the last slaves shipped from Africa before the slave trade was abolished and whom she knew before he died in 1917 at age 111.

“He was 11 when he was sold on the auction block in New Orleans,” she said. “His mother and little sister and he came over here and they were sold to three different families. He never did meet them ever again and he always wondered what happened to his little sister.”

Ruby’s vivid descriptions of the horrors of slavery and the plundering of the south by the Yankees are stories she heard from her grandmother—and they all left a deep impact on her. Her great-grandfather was a tremendous influence on her and when he died, it was a huge loss for her:

“I was 11 when he died. I was very hurt because I loved to hear him talk. He talked about flowers and snakes and every creature in the world. Louisiana had all kinds of things, all creatures, frogs and snakes and lizards. He would talk about those instead of what had gone on in slavery.”

Today, Ruby’s gold wedding band is the only living reminiscence of the life she had led as a young girl in Louisiana. In 1967, after retiring from Lockheed Aircraft in California, Ruby got married to Bill Harmon and moved to Berkeley. And thus began a completely new chapter in her life—one through which she found her calling for social justice and service.

When asked whether she misses Louisiana, her father’s farm, or Arcadia, she wrote on her yellow pad, “No — I can’t because I am all grown up.”

Now, on the cusp of being alive for a century, Ruby said she is looking forward to her big birthday.

“I am very excited about Thursday,” she wrote. “There will be a party with homemade birthday cake. And ice cream. Lots of it.”

After serving as a curator at the Berkeley Art Museum since September 2005, Chris Gilbert abruptly resigned because of rising conflicts with museum administrators over his controversial project “Now Time: Media Along the Path of the Bolivarian Process,” part two of which is currently showing at the UC Berkeley museum.

Gilbert is now in South Korea, where he is currently curator for the Gwangin ju Biennale exhibit, but he explained the reason for his April 28 resignation in an e-mail to the Daily Planet.

“My struggles with the museum over the content and approach of the projects in the ‘Now-Time Venezuela’ series go back quite a few months,” he wrote. “In particular the museum administrators—meaning the deputy directors and senior curator collaborating, of course, with the public relations and audience development staff—have for some time been insisting that I take the idea of solidarity, revolutionary solidarity, out of the project. For some months, they have said they wanted ‘neutrality’ and ‘balance’ whereas I have always said that instead my approach is about commitment, support, and alignment—in brief, taking sides with and promoting revolution.”

The “Now-Time” cycle exhibit received a large response—drawing 180 visitors to the March 26 panel discussion that opened “Now-Time.” The exhibit was popular because of the class interests it stood by and because of the fact that it promoted the idea that contemporary art is in danger.

Kevin E. Consey, museum director, told the Planet that in Gilbert’s resignation letter to Connie Lewellen, chief curator, Gilbert had offered no explanation for his decision.

“I gather from newspaper reports that Gilbert resigned because he felt that the university did not want to support his projects and therefore he did not want to continue working here any more,” Consey said. “We recommended him, hired him, gave him a budget, sent him to Venezuela, supported him academically and even held two symposiums after he returned. It does seem strange to me that after doing all this he felt that we did not support him.”

Consey added that he has been “perfectly pleased and happy” with the exhibit and thought that it made an excellent point about politically relevant art in Venezuela.

Gilbert had been selected last September through a national search process for the position of MATRIX curator who puts together changing exhibits at the museum. The selection committee had been impressed with Gilbert and his earlier work, including that as curator of contemporary art at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and he had been offered a position in Berkeley.

When asked to comment about the reasons for resignation stated in his e-mail, Connie Lewellen, BMA chief curator, told the Planet: “Chris couldn’t do the program as he wanted and therefore he wanted to resign.”

Peter Selz, founding director of the Berkeley Art Museum and a former curator of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, said he was shocked to learn of Gilbert’s resignation. (Selz wrote a review of the exhibit for the Planet.)

“Gilbert’s work was vey politically radical in spirit,” Selz said. “I felt that the kind of politically engaged art that he was showing, exemplifying the series of videos dealing with revolutionary Venezuela, is a very important aspect of contemporary art. I feel that it was very appropriate for the Berkeley campus to exhibit excellent art of dissent. I regret that Mr. Gilbert has felt it necessary to resign from the Berkeley Art Museum after such a brief tenure.”

Gilbert explained that his decision to leave stemmed from an argument over a text panel for the ‘Now Time’ exhibit.

“Their plan was to replace the phrase ‘in solidarity with revolutionary Venezuela’ with a phrase like ‘concerning revolutionary Venezuela,’ for another phrase describing a relation that would not be explicitly one of solidarity,” he wrote.

Gilbert said he threatened to resign and terminate the exhibition if his langauge wasn’t kept. Having received no reply, on April 28, he handed in his letter of resignation and said he would cancel the show. According to Gilbert, the musuem agreed to restore his text panel as he had written it.

“Having won that battle, though at the price of losing my position, I decided to go forward with the show, my last one,” Gilbert wrote in his e-mail to the Planet.

The show is scheduled to run for two more weeks.

According to Gilbert, the general outlines of this incident mirror the familiar patterns of class struggle. He said that the class interests represented by the UC museum, which are above all the interests of the bourgeoisie that funds it, have two things to fear from a project like his.

“One, of course, revolutionary Venezuela is a symbolic threat to the U.S. government and the capitalist class that benefits from that government’s policies,” he wrote. “The second threat, which is probably the more operational one in the museum context, is that much of the community is in favor of the ‘Now-Time’ projects . . . The museum, the bourgeois values it promotes via the institution of contemporary art (contemporary art of the past 30 years is really in most respects simply the cultural arm of upper-class power) are not really those of any class but its own. Importantly the museum and the bourgeoisie will always deny the role of class interests in this.”

With a lease set to expire on a seismically unsound building, Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) officials are pushing to relocate district headquarters.

West Campus, a district-owned parcel on University Avenue between Curtis and Bonar streets, is the designated new command center.

On Thursday, BUSD will present architectural renderings for the northeast corner of the property, which will house district administration, classrooms, professional development facilities and other offices. The site would also include surface parking.

“I’m very excited about it,” said Board of Education President Terry Doran. “I think it will address many of the needs of the district, especially relocating administrative offices.”

At present, BUSD administrators occupy Old City Hall at 2134 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, a city-run building branded unsafe because it is not retrofitted for earthquakes.

The district’s lease on Old City Hall runs out in 2009. Consequently, officials are moving quickly to develop West Campus, a site that served as the Adult School for 20 years. It was abandoned in 2004.

Preliminary drawings, prepared by Baker Vilar Architects, show demolition of six structures north of Addison Street and east of the playing field at University and Curtis. An existing classroom building on Bonar at Addison and an auditorium at University and Bonar will both remain. A new 8,000 to 10,000-square-foot classroom and administration building would extend from the latter.

District administration offices would predominantly take up the first and second floors of the Bonar Street building, which would also hold a print center, a purchasing warehouse and conference rooms. Classes would be held on the third floor for about 145 independent study students—who currently occupy space at the Alternative High School campus—and other yet-to-be-identified students.

“The superintendent has a dream of that being a real educational facility not just offices,” said district spokesperson Mark Coplan. “We anticipate a lot of different programs, but we haven’t identified what they will be at this point.”

The building on University would accommodate a Board of Education room, a media lab and library, staff development facilities, conference rooms and other offices. About 100 parking spaces would be accessible via entryways on University and Addison.

District officials expect administrators to move in by spring 2009. The estimated cost of the project is $9.93 million in Measure A and Measure AA funding. About $600,000 was already spent on minor projects, roofing and project planning.

Community members are invited to weigh in on the proposed development on-site (at the auditorium) Thursday, at 7 p.m. However, the public process that characterizes most projects in Berkeley is not on the books for this phase of West Campus development. That’s because BUSD is held to the standards of the Division of State Architects, not the city of Berkeley, district officials say. So long as instruction takes place on the premises, the district claims it is exempt from city zoning laws (though the city would be responsible for approving curb cuts for the parking lot.)

“The fact that we will have students in the building gives us no option,” said Coplan. “We have to design it to meet student needs [per state standards] and the fact is it’s a higher standard.”

Some residents are balking at that allowance, insisting that because only a portion of the buildings is designated for classrooms, the district is still accountable to the city.

“A lot of us feel it’s inappropriate,” said John McBride, who lives close to West Campus. The project “just doesn’t rise to the level of exemption from city review,” he said.

The city has not forged an official legal opinion, because the district has not provided enough information on the project, said Assistant City Attorney Zach Cowan.

“It’s not entirely clear to me what they’re doing,” he said.

Coplan said the district has been in touch with the city on numerous occasions, but not the city attorney’s office per se. Deputy City Manager Lisa Caronna called the Daily Planet later on Monday to clarify that the city is “waiting for details from the district and they are in the process of getting that information to us.”

Other concerns raised at a meeting May 5 held by the West Campus Site Committee, a group of district and community representatives, included environmental impacts, traffic, the student body makeup and the timeline for project completion.

The entire West Campus site covers 5.77 acres, but the district has only drafted a concrete concept for the northeast portion. Use for the remainder of the property, currently home to a child development center, a playing field and other structures, is still unknown, though a pool center and a gymnasium constructed in 1930 will remain.

A federal civil jury in Oakland has rejected claims that the Peralta Community College District practiced reverse discrimination, gender discrimination, and retaliation when it failed to renew the contract of John Garmon, the former president of Vista Community College in Berkeley.

In addition, the same jury ruled that then-Peralta trustee Darryl Moore—now a Berkeley City Councilmember—did not defame Garmon in remarks Moore made about the former college president in a Berkeley Daily Planet article in June of 2004. Moore was named individually by Garmon in the lawsuit and would have been personally liable for the damages had the jury found against him.

Garmon, who is white, filed the lawsuit against the district in the fall of 2004. He served as Vista president for three years since 2001 until Peralta trustees voted not to renew his contract in May of 2004. He now is a professor in the English Department at College of Alameda, a Peralta District college.

In his lawsuit, Garmon said that when he was hired by Peralta, he was told by district officials it would be long-term. He claimed that “but for [my] race, Caucasian, [my] contract with Peralta would have been renewed and [I] would not have been removed as President.”

He also claimed that he was terminated “because of his complaints of reverse discrimination and his advocacy for fair practices and procedures.”

While the jury ruled that Garmon had proved that his “opposition to decisions or practices [in the college district] that he reasonably believed were racially discriminatory was a motivating factor in [Peralta’s] decision not to renew his contract,” the jury also ruled that the district had other “lawful reasons” for firing him. The jury awarded Garmon $1 for past and future emotional distress.

Attorney Larry Frierson of Calistoga, the outside counsel the Peralta District hired to represent both Peralta and Moore in the lawsuit, said that he was only authorized to say that “the district is pleased with the verdict,” and could make no other comment.

Garmon’s attorneys, Wells & Hopkins of Tiburon, could not be reached for comment.

In a June 4 Daily Planet article written by then-staff reporter Matthew Artz, Moore denied the reverse discrimination claims, saying that Peralta Chancellor Elihu Harris “had been talking to Garmon for months about concerns over his performance,” that Garmon “knew he wasn’t going to be renewed,” and that “the vote [that rejected the renewal of Garmon’s contract] had nothing to do with [Garmon’s] race and everything to do with his performance.”

In the same article, Moore said that Garmon had “dropped the ball” on fundraising for Vista’s new downtown campus, and had failed to build community support for the college’s then-upcoming 30th anniversary celebration.

Garmon later wrote Moore asking him to “correct the record and apologize” for what Garmon called the “false, misleading and incriminating statements” Moore made about him in the article.

While the federal jury ruled that Garmon had proved that the statements made by Moore in the Daily Planet article were false, it also ruled that the former college president had failed to prove that Moore knew at the time the statements were false.

Moore said by telephone, “I’m glad that this is over, it ends my chapter with Peralta,” and declined further comment.

Andrew Martinez, who as a 19-year-old UC Berkeley undergraduate created national news in November 1992 for getting suspended from the university for attending class in little more than a pair of sandals and a backback, was found unconscious in his Santa Clara County jail cell at 11:19 p.m. on Wednesday and declared dead early Thursday.

Last seen alive at 11 p.m. on Wednesday, Martinez, 33, was found under his bed clothes with a plastic bag around his head, leading jail officials to label the incident an apparent suicide.

In custody for three felony charges of battery and assault with a deadly weapon during a Jan. 10 fight at a halfway house where he was living, Martinez was being housed solitarily in a maximum security area in the Santa Clara jail.

Martinez reportedly had a history of mental illness and was seeing mental health professionals for the last couple of weeks. Calls made to the Santa Clara County jail for comment on the subject were not returned.

Martinez was responsible for staging a “nude-in” on campus with over 20 people in September 1992, an action he vociferously defended at the event as well as in the media. Martinez defended his Sproul Hall Plaza “nude-in” by saying that he was trying to make a point about free expression in the birthplace of the 1964 Free Speech Movement.

According to media reports, he told the crowd at the event that “what I am getting out here is there’s a lot of social control going on here.”

His philosophy toward free speech, free expression, and his non-conformist outlook made him a hero in the eyes of those advocating nudity, and his followers included X-plicit Players, a performance troupe from Berkeley.

Because of his nudist exploits on campus, Martinez went on to appear in scores of newspaper articles and was even featured in the October 1993 issue of Playboy and a issue of Playgirl. He also appeared in several TV shows.

List said, “I heard that Andy took one look at the picture and told Ace, ‘I am overexposed.’ However I don’t think he meant it to be funny.”

List remembers Martinez as being a confused person.

“He looked like he was perpetually in a fog,” he said. “It’s really sad that they couldn’t cure him of his mental problems.”

An A student at Monta Vista High School in Cupertino, Martinez was known as a “math whiz” on the Berkeley campus and was liked by his peers for his kindhearted ways.

The “nude-in” incident led to a few other students coming to class in the nude, and Martinez was ultimately expelled in 1993 from the university for refusing to wear clothes. Martinez was also arrested for showing up with some of his supporters in the buff at a City Hall meeting, because of which he was arrested under the Berkeley city ordinance adopted in July 1993.

Mary Wainwright, then a Berkeley councilmember, had proposed the ban on nudity after Martinez had testified before the City Council in the nude.

After being expelled from school, Martinez lived at numerous halfway homes and psychiatric wards.

Commenting on Martinez’s death, Berkeley councilmember Kriss Worthington said, “This is the tragic reality that is repeated everyday with mental health cases. We need to prioritize mental health patients rather than criminalizing them.”

Worthington added that Martinez had lived down the street from him, and he had often spotted him on the UC Berkeley campus and at the city government meetings.

“He was a colorful character and definitely made people stop and look,” he said. “His ideas were interesting and he had a novel sort of a way of exposing the humanness in each of us. Andrew pointed out that the clothes don’t make the person—it’s your ideas, the way you live your life.”

Photograph by Rory Merry

Andrew Martinez, ‘the naked guy,’ being arrested outside the offices of the Associated Students of UC Berkeley in the summer of 1992.

Some 60 self-identified political progressives got together on Saturday at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship Hall to try to turn an 18-page draft document into a progressive platform. It was a tightly run meeting, but only half of the draft was covered, so the convention will reconvene June 3.

While the platform is intended to bring the various progressive groups together, “it won’t be a litmus test” for endorsement for office, convener Laurence Schechtman said. However, an endorsement convention is planned for July, he said.

The event drew a number of elected officials—Supervisor Keith Carson, Councilmember Kriss Worthington, School Board Member John Selawski and Rent Board Members Howard Chong and Jason Overman.

Past and present city commissioners from the Planning Commission, the Zoning Adjustments Board, the Commission on Homelessness, the Mental Health Commission, the Peace and Justice Commission and more were also on hand, as were mayoral candidates Zachary Runningwolf and newcomer Christian Pecaut, who says he’s moving to Berkeley from San Francisco in order to run.

While individuals in attendance said they belong to a number of other progressive groups—the Green Party, Berkeley Citizen’s Action (BCA), the Berkeley Progressive Alliance (out of which the Berkeley Progressive Coalition was born) and various Democratic Party clubs—all participated in the convention as individuals. The BPC structure is still evolving, Schechtman said.

BCA member Mel Martynn said he had come to “check out” the convention and didn’t see it as competing with BCA.

“We’re going through a transition,” Martynn said of the 30-year-old organization, whose endorsement was at one time key to the victory of progressives in Berkeley. “What is important is that the goals, values and ideals of BCA continue, as opposed to the organization. We’re willing to work with other progressives.”

Martynn added: “We might end up endorsing the same candidates.”

Four years ago, another group of self-styled progressives led by Councilmember Dona Spring convened the Coalition for a New Mayor, to encourage Tom Bates to run for mayor. Eighty-seven percent of those present at a May 2004 convention of that group called on him to run. Bates has since lost favor with some who participated, including Spring.

“There was such motivation to defeat Mayor (Shirley) Dean that factionalism on the left gave way to complete unity behind Bates,” wrote David Mundstock, a chronicler of Berkeley’s political history, on the Berkeley Campaign Art Website.

The Coalition for a New Mayor wrote no platform in 2004. The last platform BCA wrote was in 1988, according to Schechtman.

Sam Ferguson, who works with both BPA and BPC, helped to write the draft platform plank on fair elections and led that discussion Saturday.

“Elections should be about people power,” he said, before reading a draft plank that called for Instant Runoff Voting, public financing of local elections and accessible voting machines that have a paper trail.

An amendment to go back to the paper ballot proposed by Runningwolf was voted down, but one presented by Judy Shelton to call for the use of voting machines that create a paper trail with separate pieces of paper rather than a roll was supported.

The youth and education plank focused largely on addressing the divide in education between low-income minorities and more affluent Caucasian students. It emphasized the need to encourage ethnic pride and include opportunities for the arts and recreation. Also included was a call for funding outdoor swimming pools and the indoor warm pool.

The group accepted an amendment put forward by Algeria-born artist-activist Khalil Bendib calling on the schools to make sure the curriculum “includes non-European perspectives.”

The platform addressed issues of homelessness and poverty, endorsing creating specific spaces for people without homes to sleep outdoors and in their vehicles. While the original platform had called for housing for those with very low income, it was amended to add the needs of persons with no income at all.

A bill now pending in the state Legislature would end the bonuses that enable larger apartment buildings and condominium complexes to get even larger—but developers say it would end infill development in cities like Berkeley.

The measure, by Assemblymember Loni Hancock, would bar granting the so-called inclusionary bonus to projects with a density greater than 40 units per acre.

Patrick Kennedy, who has built most of the new housing in downtown Berkeley in recent years, said none of his projects could have been built had Hancock’s proposed law been in place.

“I’m bumfuzzled by it all,” said Kennedy. “She’s been a consistent supporter of transit-oriented infill development, and now this.”

Evan McDonald, a partner in Hudson McDonald LLC, which has developed many Kennedy projects and is now developing a major housing project at 1885 University Ave., agreed with Kennedy.

Currently, state law allows developers to increase project size by up to 35 percent for reserving some units—20 percent in the case of Berkeley—at reduced rents or sales prices.

The bonus is designed to allow building owners to recover funds lost from their legally imposed obligation to provide the required lower-income units.

The bonus has been the subject of ongoing debate within the city’s Zoning Adjustments Board and Planning Commission.

A joint task force involving both agencies is now hashing out details of what may become a new set of local codes for the units.

While rentals must be rented to individuals or families earning less than the area’s median income (AMI), the city has allowed condo developers to set inclusionary unit prices at levels affordable to those earning 120 percent of the median—though that rate is being lowered to 80 percent of AMI.

Under the current calculations used by the city, planning department staff calculated that developers of the nine-story condo building now planned for Center Street west of Shattuck Avenue were entitled to build a 14-story project.

That figure was arrived at by combining the inclusionary bonus with the city’s downtown cultural bonus and using calculations to arrive at a figure that would restore funds lost by provision of the inclusionary units.

It was that finding that triggered the current discussions among the city commission and board members.

Hancock’s measure, Assembly Bill 2484, would end the bonus on projects in urban areas with more than 40 units per acre, with a 25-unit maximum set in suburban areas and 20 in rural settings.

The bill would also set limits on parking spaces for units in the larger exempt projects, with one space for studio and one-bedroom apartment, two spaces for two- and three-bedroom units and two-and-a-half spaces for units with four or more bedrooms.

The bill is currently lodged with the Assembly Housing and Community Development Committee.

Hancock’s measure ran into strong opposition from the start, including three of the state’s most powerful constituencies: the California Chamber of Commerce, the California Association of Realtors and the California Building Industry Association.

Other opponents include the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, Housing California, the Western Center of Law and Poverty, the Southern California Association of Non-Profit Housing, Housing California, the California Association of Retired Americans and the California Association of Homes and Services for the Aging.

By comparison, the measure attracted only three supporters, the League of California Cities and the cities of Daly City and Lakewood.

Even the staff of the Assembly Committee on Housing and Urban Development registered caution, in the analysis of the measure drafted by Hubert Bower.

Noting that the latest version of the state density bonus law has been in effect less than two years and a cleanup law took effect only at the start of 2006, Bower wrote, “The Committee may wish to consider calling for a ‘cooling off’ period ... to give the most recent changes time to take effect so that all parties can evaluate their impacts and can take time to carefully negotiate any further changes to the law.”

“Even organized labor is opposed to the bill,” Kennedy said.

“The question is, what’s she trying to stop? Downtown Berkeley is already on life support, and they’re administering last rites to Telegraph Avenue,” Kennedy said.

The bonus is essential to developers, he said, as long as state law requires building owners to rent or sell units at a loss.

“What the inclusionary requirement taketh away, the density bonus giveth,” he said. “When you just have the taketh away component, you can’t make a project work ... This law is more like something you’d expect from an Orange County Republican trying to preserve one-acre lot minimums,” he said.

Converting rented apartments to condominiums is on the agenda again today (Tuesday). Last week the council reinstated a lapsed condominium conversion ordinance, which caps allowable conversion at 100 units each year and sets a conversion fee at 12.5 percent of the selling price.

The Tenant-Owner Partnership for Affordable Homes is circulating a petition that would put a competing condominium conversion ordinance on Berkeley’s November ballot.

With an affirmative vote of the council today, the city manager will prepare a report on the ballot initiative’s impacts, including the impact on city finances, the availability and location of housing, the impact on infrastructure and more.

The initiative calls for:

• Conversion of up to 500 units when the vacancy rate is at 5 percent or more as established by independent analysis.

• A conversion fee of $8 per square foot.

• A 5 percent discount to purchase and the right of first refusal for pre-existing tenants. If these tenants don’t purchase the unit, they do not have the right to stay in the unit.

• Landlords who go out of the rental business can evict tenants who do not purchase their units under the Ellis Act.

On its website, the Berkeley Property Owners Association, which is not supporting the initiative per se, touts it as an approach it has “long fought for.” The association says the measure will empower tenants to buy their own homes at a “substantial [5 percent] discount” and protects tenants from tenants-in-common conversions.

In an e-mail responding to a request for an interview, David M. Wilson, attorney representing supporters of the initiative, speaks in opposition to the current ordinance, arguing it “does nothing to solve the real housing crisis in Berkeley which is the lack of affordable ownership opportunities: in the year 2000 homeowners were about 42 percent of the population. Now they are probably about 38 percent. This is because the city and the university have added thousands of rental units to housing stock.”

He further contends that “middle-class families (including teachers, firefighters, and police) cannot enter the market. Tenants, instead of moving up to homeownership in Berkeley, move out to other places.”

Arguing against the proposed ballot initiative, Rent Stabilization Board Member Jesse Arreguin, says the proposed law would cause conversion of affordable rent-controlled apartments, leaving newer apartments, which don’t fall under rent control, vulnerable to conversion. Affordable units would be removed from the market, he argued.

“Reducing housing stock drives prices up,” Arreguin said, adding that “buying a condo is not possible for people earning $30,000 or less.”

The proposed ballot measure could bring radical change to Berkeley, making it “a city of people of higher income and less diversity,” he said.

Clean elections

The City Council will vote on whether to place an initiative on the ballot which would support a charter amendment in favor of public financing of elections.

According to the ballot measure as written, the present system of raising funds for campaigns “creates a danger of corruption by encouraging elected officials to take money from private interests that are directly affected by governmental actions, forces candidates to raise larger and larger percentages of money from interest groups that have a specific financial stake in matters before the Berkeley City government ..., violates the rights of all citizens to equal … participation in the democratic process, [and] disadvantages challengers.”

The remedy would be to have candidates collect $5 donations from a large number of individuals in order to qualify for public financing—a candidate for mayor would have to collect $5 from 600 people and a City Council candidate would have to collect $5 each from 150 people.

In return, council candidates would get $20,000 to spend on the campaign and a mayoral candidate would get $140,000. Provisions are made to increase the amount for candidates facing challengers who have not accepted public financing.

“It’s a voluntary system,” said Sam Ferguson, who has worked on the ballot measure.

The system is already in place in Portland, Ore., and Albuquerque, N.M., Ferguson said, noting, “It allows candidates to run on the basis of ideas, not how much money they can raise.”

West Berkeley Bowl

The Zoning Adjustments Board approved the West Berkeley Bowl project on April 25, which, according to a staff report, is likely to be appealed. The City Council is being asked to vote to call for a public hearing on the project for June 13.

Assisting Telegraph Avenue businesses

The council will be asked to vote, in concept, for an economic development assistance package to improve the Telegraph Avenue commercial area, including an increased police presence, better lighting and street cleaning, streamlining permits for the district, improved social services and launching a joint marketing effort with the university. An affirmative vote will have the city manager return with a detailed plan.

Other matters

The council will vote on upgrading Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park, addressing hypertension in the African-American community, making sure the Association for Sports Field Users is documenting and using city funds correctly and rebuilding homes after a disaster “by right” on the same footprint as were previously located.

A council workshop on the budget related to infrastructure begins at 5 p.m., with the regular city council meeting at 7 p.m.

A Catholic church and a moving and storage warehouse could be the latest recipients of wireless telecommunications facilities in Berkeley.

Nextel Communications and Verizon Wireless want to erect multiple antennae and related equipment at UC Storage on Shattuck Avenue, while AT&T Wireless hopes to construct a telecommunications facility at St. Ambrose Catholic Church on Gilman Street.

Each project will go before the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) for use permits at a regularly scheduled meeting Thursday.

Nextel is proposing 12 standard antennae and a global positioning system (GPS) antenna at the four-story UC Storage building, formerly Shattuck Avenue Self Storage, at 2721 Shattuck Ave. between Ward and Derby streets. The project includes installation of an emergency backup generator, an air conditioner and additional equipment. Verizon would install similar equipment at the same site, though it would erect about half as many antennae.

UC Storage is located on a commercial corridor that features shops like Any Mountain, Kirala and Berkeley Bowl. There are residential properties to the east.

An additional proposal up for consideration Thursday would involve the installation of three regular antennae, a GPS antenna and other equipment at St. Ambrose Catholic Church, at 1145 Gilman St., between Stannage and Cornell avenues, a low- to medium-density residential area. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Oakland owns the building.

Providers say the new facilities would alleviate poor reception or overload on nearby towers. Both the church and the storage company receive payment for leasing their property, but how much is not clear because providers do not release that information.

Neither UC Storage Manager Eddie Maciel nor Father George Alengadan of St. Ambrose was available for comment.

Some Berkeley residents who insist that wireless technology could pose health hazards to humans and the environment oppose the projects.

“There have not been enough studies to conclude the safety of wireless technology,” said Mary Wyand, a Stannage Avenue resident, and Paul Vellutini, in an e-mail to the city. “My family, my neighbors and I do not want to be lab rats.”

The correspondence details how other countries, such as Switzerland and England, have taken steps to harness risks associated with wireless technologies.

But in the United States, under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, local governments are precluded from regulating wireless services based on environmental effects of emissions. Because all three projects comply with the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) regulations that stipulate maximum exposure limits, the city cannot deny proposed wireless development on health objections alone.

Aesthetics is a further prominent community concern—one that ZAB is capable of regulating. To grant a use permit, ZAB must find that facilities are not readily visible or that it is impossible to incorporate additional measures to reduce visibility.

The Design Review Committee (DRC) granted preliminary approval to plans for UC Storage on condition that providers reroute cables internally to minimize a potential eyesore. Nextel and Verizon say they cannot meet that requirement due to structural limitations.

The committee did not consider St. Ambrose for review because design staff determined that the proposed facilities are not overly conspicuous.

Community members have also raised questions about how much noise the equipment would generate. Studies conducted by Illingworth & Rodkin, Inc., a Petaluma-based acoustics and air quality engineering firm, found that sounds emitted at both sites would not exceed limits spelled out in the city’s Noise Ordinance.

An additional concern exclusive to Shattuck Avenue residents is that a portion of the proposals—particularly equipment placement on the Ward Street frontage—may not be permitted for commercial use because permits for nearby stores, like Any Mountain and Kirala, do not allow for commercial use there. City staff insists that those use permits are not germane to the projects at hand.

Other items on the agenda for Thursday’s ZAB meeting include:

• continued discussion of a mixed-use housing and commercial project at 1885 University Ave.

• an application to build a bell tower at the Jesuit School of Theology at 1735 LeRoy Ave.

• expansion of a machining shop at 2735 San Pablo Ave. with a single-story addition to the rear of an existing two-story building.

• a carryout food service and teller machine at Grove Market on Martin Luther King Jr. Way.

It’s the panel’s last chance to comment before the council takes up the ordinance next month.

Meanwhile, the City Council will discuss tonight (Tuesday) a counter-proposal now being circulated in the form of a public initiative to replace the existing ordinance with a slightly modified version supporters say would preserve the intent of the existing law without eliminating protections, as they claim the Bates/Capitelli measure would.

Preservationists have been busily rounding up the needed 2,007 valid signatures from registered voters to qualify the measure for the November ballot and submit them to City Clerk Sara Cox.

“We’d like to get all the petitions by the end of the month or early June at the latest,” said Cox. “We’re very short-staffed and so is the county Registrar of Voters.”

If successful, the initiative would block the changes proposed in the Bates/Capitelli measure.

Asked if the needed signatures had already been collected, Laurie Bright, one of the proponents of the measure, commented, “I wouldn’t deny that.” He declined to offer any specifics on the number already obtained.

The mayor’s ordinance includes changes that critics say would greatly weaken protections for landmark buildings in Berkeley, while supporters contend the measure merely creates one that complies with other state regulations and removes ambiguities facing property owners.

One of the provisions of the council proposal would allow demolition of landmarks if the replacement would fulfill an important public policy that would outweigh any detriment resulting from destruction of a public legacy.

The council is scheduled to take up a proposal from City Manager Phil Kamlarz to direct the staff to review the financial and other implications of the initiative measure, which preservationists Bright and Roger Marquis are proposing.

The mayor’s proposal has won the endorsement of developers, who say that the current ordinance has proven an obstacle to their plans.

Bates has reportedly told preservationists he wouldn’t demand a council vote on his measure if the ballot initiative qualified, and hinted at a more drastic measure should the preservationist initiative fail in November.

In recent years, the council has generally sided with developers on appeals of cases where neighborhood activists have been able to landmark properties in response to demolitions called for by developers in order to build new projects.

Such was the case with the landmarking of the building housing Celia’s Mexican Restaurant at 2040 Fourth St. The LPC declared the building a Structure of Merit, one of the city’s two categories of landmarks.

The City Council overturned the designation, which could have blocked condo and retail project plans for 700 University Avenue by Urban Housing Group.

Once the signatures have been counted and validated as enough to qualify for the ballot, the City Council must then order the measure placed on the November ballot by Aug. 11.

The last meeting before the council takes its traditional summer break is July 18, and the city and the county must have 30 working days after the petitions are turned in to examine the signatures, Cox said.

“I really encourage people to get them in sooner rather than later,” she said.

Several LPC members—particularly members Patti Dacey, Lesley Emmington and Carrie Olson—have been highly critical of the mayor’s proposal, insisting that the alterations they included in their own draft were more than sufficient to meet deadlines and other issues imposed by state law.

The LPC meeting, which was scheduled by the commission at their May 4 meeting, was not posted on the official calendar on the city’s web site as of Monday afternoon.

An abandoned three-mile stretch of railroad right-of-way in Richmond will begin its conversion into a community walking and biking trail Thursday.

At 10 a.m., Mayor Irma Anderson, City Councilmember Tom Butt, city and county staff and students from Lincoln Elementary School will break ground for the Richmond Greenway.

Unused for a quarter-century and filled with weeds, the right-of-way is being transformed into a community corridor through the joint efforts of the city, Contra Costa County, the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy and the Healthy Transportation Network.

According to Benjamin Gettleman, much of the credit goes to Richmond City Councilmember Tom Butt.

“He’s really been the local champion from the beginning, for more than 20 years,” said Gettleman, who runs the western regional office of Rails-to-Trails Conservancy.

Rails-to-Trails is a nationwide organization with more than 100,000 members and supporters dedicated to turning abandoned and unused railroad rights-of-way into recreational hubs.

It was Butt who asked Rails-to-Trails to get involved, Gettleman said.

The Greenway follows a three-mile stretch of right-of-way abandoned by the Atcheson, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway and deeded over to the city in 1979.

The property, encompassing 32 acres, runs from Garrard Boulevard on the west to Key Boulevard on the east, running parallel with Chanslor and Ohio streets.

Thursday’s ceremony will mark the start of construction on the trail’s western segment, which should be completed in time to open early next year.

Rails-to-Trails has helped the city find funding for the project, which has come in part from a grant from the Transportation for Livable Community program of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) and the Contra Costa Transportation Authority State Transportation Improvement Program.

The MTC kicked off the project in 2000 with a planning grant, followed by $50,000 in state funds and a July 2001 vote by MTC to allocate $1.9 million for construction of the first phase, which was originally planned to start two years ago.

“The second phase will take the project to San Pablo Avenue and the Ohlone Greenway, and on into Berkeley,” said Butt.

When completed, the trail will extend all the way from western Berkeley to Point Richmond.

While the project’s master plan spells out a budget of more than $15 million, Butt said the costs included a “wish list of projects we’d like to see,” including a pedestrian-and-bicycle bridge over San Pablo Avenue.

Butt said the Greenway project is one of several quality-of-life issues that have nearly foundered in Richmond.

“The city gets money, and then it goes into the general fund and gets squandered. Mayor Anderson has been especially helpful on the Greenway, and she’s salvaged it more than once,” he said.

Councilmember Linda Maio dropped her ’94 Honda EX station wagon off at Berkeley Honda for a routine checkup Friday, signaling the end of the council’s longstanding boycott against the dealership.

The City Council lifted the boycott Tuesday, following the close of a bitter 10-month strike in late April when service workers reached a contract agreement with dealership owners. Councilmembers are now urging citizens to return to Berkeley Honda.

“We’re all happy the strike is resolved, and we’re encouraging people to bring their cars into the dealership for service,” said Maio.

Employees from Machinists Lodge 1546 and Teamsters Local 78 walked off the job last June when new dealership owners refused to rehire all the veteran workers and renew union contracts. The unions quickly gathered support from community members who helped stage biweekly rallies in front of the dealership at 2600 Shattuck Ave. The Berkeley City Council sanctioned a boycott of Berkeley Honda in July.

Patronage of car servicing plummeted by about 60 percent, Berkeley Honda General Manager Steve Haworth told the Planet last month. On Friday, Haworth reported that business has tripled since the end of the strike.

The new contract offers workers a wage hike, a pension deal and extends employment to workers not hired back last June.

So far, dealership management has offered to rehire six workers; just two have accepted. (The others are either on disability or found other jobs.) The rest of the employees will be reinstated in phases as work demands dictate.

Said Haworth, “The quicker the business comes back, the quicker the employees come back.”

A UC Berkeley student and her mother were confronted by a pair of bandits using that old “I’ve got a gun in my pocket routine” as they walked near the corner of Ellsworth Street and Durant Avenue just before 10:30 Thursday night.

One of the bandits grabbed the student’s purse while another tried to grab her mother’s. Mom screamed, and the nonplussed bandits fled, reports UC Berkeley Police Chief Victoria Harrison.

The two men were African-Americans in their mid-20s, and both were thinly built, stood about 5’10” and wore their hair in braids. One was clean shaven and the other sported a goatee.

Still broken

The Berkeley Police Department’s online Community Crime View software appears to be still be broken, and no incidents have been posted since May 5. Calls made to the department Monday afternoon weren’t returned.

Opinion

Editorials

When I was a child, Memorial Day was called Decoration Day. It functioned as a paler Midwestern version of Mexico’s colorful Dia de Los Muertos, a day for the dead. We went out to a big cemetery where several deceased family members were buried—our family plot included the grave of my uncle who had died not long before in World War II—and actually decorated the graves, or at least straightened them up. We helped clear away the weeds which had accumulated since the last winter, ran around a bit, and thought as much as children can about what it means to be dead.

Decoration Day began around 1870 as the day for tending the burial sites of the Civil War dead, in number about 560,000, a sizable percentage of the population at the time. It was observed at first on different days in different places, but eventually the date of May 30 became standard throughout the country. In more recent years the name Memorial Day has become accepted, and the date has shifted to the last Monday in May. The inevitable effect of Monday-izing holidays is that the three-day weekend creates a focus on recreation which dilutes the original meaning of the day—the same thing happened with Armistice Day, now Veterans’ Day.

For most of us, Memorial Day now means barbecues, baseball games and garage sales. Even so, it would be wise to set aside just a few moments to reflect on the original meaning of the day, and its relevance to what’s going on now.

As it was at the time of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in 1863, our country is now “engaged in a great civil war.” The problem is that it’s not our civil war this time, it’s Iraq’s. And it’s a civil war that our country created, but now seems powerless to stop. No matter what flavor of lie is currently being pushed by the national administration, even Republicans are becoming aware that the situation has deteriorated to a point where it’s mostly gang warfare with religious overtones—with U.S. forces no more able to stop it than the cops in Richmond are able to stop the violence there.

And it isn’t even a civil war that the Iraqi people started, or that most of them even understand. The current thumbnail history of this endeavor is that the war was launched on the basis of justifications that were complete lies, swallowed whole by Congress and press alike. What was actually going on in Iraq at the time had nothing to do with it.

Lincoln wanted Americans thinking about the deaths at Gettysburg to “resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.” Perhaps if we still maintained the custom of visiting the graves of our war dead once a year, we might be more sympathetic to the suffering this country is inflicting on people like us in Iraq.

The Iraq war has now gone on, in this round, three years, just one less that the American Civil War. The death toll for Iraqis and foreigners of all kinds, combatants and non-combatants, is estimated at several hundred thousand, though exact figures are impossible to obtain, but it’s a significant percentage of the population. It’s easy to think of the Iraqi war dead as statistics, and to forget that each grave in Iraq holds someone’s uncle, someone’s mother, someone’s child, just like our own graves.

The goal now seems to be to establish permanent well-fortified military bases in the Middle East which are as much like the United States as possible inside their walls. These bases will control an endless lake of oil, to be tapped ad infinitum by multi-national corporations. Iran may be next.

And who cares what happens to the locals outside such walls? Some of us do, others don’t. It’s not really red vs. blue, as the TV folks would have you believe.

It’s almost like the United States has split into three countries these days: our new “American civil war.” At the top of the heap is the war profiteers, also known as the government, who live to line their pockets. The “average Americans” are stuck at the bottom of the heap, though they mostly don’t realize it. Their real income is steadily shrinking, but they’re distracted by baseball and barbecues and don’t know or don’t care what’s being done in Iraq in their name. And then there’s the rest of us, those who understand how the U.S. economy is being destroyed and that the Iraqi people are dying in a civil war they never wanted.

There’s some hope in the poll numbers which tell us that only 29 percent of Americans now think that George Bush is doing a good job. Will the other 71 percent progress from that point to understanding how to stop what’s going wrong? That’s not clear, since even some of the more intelligent pundits haven’t yet accepted what seems self-evident to the rest of us: that the United States will have to get out of Iraq all together if the fighting there is ever to stop. The November election will tell the tale.

On Monday two UC Berkeley professors, Raymond Seed and Robert Bea, professors of civil and environmental engineering, presented the findings of an independent investigation team of 36 engineers and scientists from around the nation which they led in studying why the levees in New Orleans failed after Hurricane Katrina. Previous reports, including one from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, seemed to indicate that the failure of the levees was more or less inevitable, given the severity of the storm. But this independent team, whose members (except for a few graduate students) were working pro bono, free in the public interest, had a different take on what went wrong. Which turned out to be almost everything….

The report of the Independent Investigation Team (IIT) stressed the fact that levee design was not subjected to the same peer review process commonly used in dam design. It notes that “such review would have likely caught and challenged errors and poor judgments (both in engineering and in policy and funding) that led to failures during Hurricane Katrina.” A repeated complaint in the report is that cheap solutions were consistently chosen over safe solutions, or in the more polite prose of the report “there was a persistent pattern of attempts to reduce costs of constructed works, at the price of corollary reduction in safety and reliability. This represented a policy that has now been shown to be ‘penny wise and pound foolish.’” One example: the use of cheap sandy dredged materials instead of packed clay to fill levees.

The investigators are engineers, not politicians, but their report takes a sharp look at the political processes which produced this result. Their conclusion is that there were many different things which all went wrong and caused “the resulting catastrophe.”

Two major categories, in addition to the hurricane itself, are targeted. One is “the poor performance of the flood protection system, due to localized engineering failures, questionable judgments, errors, etc.” The first half of the report details all of these in exhaustive detail. The second is institutional problems with the interactions between national, state and local agencies responsible for the flood protection system’s design, construction and maintenance.

One problem highlighted is the recent history of pressures put on the Corps of Engineers to do more with less, to “do their projects better, faster, and cheaper.” The report compares these pressures to those on the National Aeronautics and Space Agency which were uncovered after the shuttle disaster: “Our study indicates that, as in the case of NASA, technical and engineering superiority and oversight [were] compromised in attempts to respond to all of these constraints and pressures.”

Penny wise and pound foolish, indeed. This report might be taken as an indictment of almost everything that’s wrong with our current governmental systems at all levels. The Bush administration is gleefully cutting taxes for the rich, and thereby exposing the rest of the citizens to hazards of all kinds from which they have a right to be protected.

The IIT report’s findings and conclusions section contains recommendations that could profitably be applied to everything done by government. In particular, Recommendation 2 is to “Exploit the major and unprecedented role that exists for citizens who should be considered part of governance in the spirit that those who govern do so at the informed consent of the governed….the public protected by the [New Orleans Flood Defense System] need to be encouraged to actively and intelligently interact with its development.” In other words, the people who are at risk should be “asked for their informed consent especially regarding tradeoffs of safety for cost.” Good idea.

The report is a generally fine piece of engineering analysis. Its flaws are the mirror of its virtues: if anything, it’s too engineering-heavy. The list of its contributors shows no obvious ecologists, biologists or historians, all of whom might have added dimension to the discussion. A traditional American failure mode is to believe that everything can be fixed by engineers, when sometimes what’s wrong was the initial choice of task. Besides trying to figure out what’s the best way to fix the levees, as a society we should also be considering how the choice of draining wetlands and holding back the sea was made in the first place, and whether it could or should be reversed in part.

The report makes a few slighting references to environmental impact studies, hinting that the Corps of Engineers is being pushed to do frivolous environmental research in place of apparently more highly valued straight civil engineering. It’s a false dichotomy: What’s needed is not either/or but both. We’re no longer in a time when building decisions can be made without evaluating their impact on the fragile environment. Of course, when levees are built, they should be built right or not at all, but as a society we are now obliged to give proper consideration to alternatives as well. Choosing engineering solutions over ecology is just another way of being penny wise and pound foolish. We can afford both.

Public Comment

I want to thank everyone who has expressed support for registering Berkeley Iceland as a Berkeley Landmark. This is the first step in saving the rink and skating in Berkeley. The hearing on the application before the Berkeley Landmarks Preservation Commission will be on Thursday, June 1 at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst St., from 7:30-9:30 p.m. Please join us to show the community support for saving Iceland.

Tom Killilea

SaveBerkeleyIceland.com

•

ANOTHER RELIGIOUS WAR?

Editors, Daily Planet:

What is the sense of trying to authenticate any religion, since it has been written and rewritten throughout the ages? The myths handed down are simply guidelines and can be beautiful. That is, if spiritually were incorporated with love and acceptance in their lives. Idealists and fanatics sanction their own beliefs only, creating retaliation, eventually wars. Is history merely repeating itself?

Joy A. Flaherty

•

BUS RAPID TRANSIT

Editors, Daily Planet:

On May 11, I attended a meeting at Willard Middle school on Bus Rapid Transit. According to information I learned there, AC Transit thinks this system, running through San Leandro, Oakland and Berkeley, will be a success because of the great numbers of people living and working near the route. However, at the meeting, I noted a tremendous amount of animosity because the reduction of car lanes on Telegraph Avenue is likely to push traffic into residential neighborhoods adjacent to the route. I would suggest to AC Transit that it is not a good idea to antagonize potential customers. Perhaps they can find a way to protect side streets from additional traffic.

In addition, I think it is important to have some kind of incentive program. For instance, UC Berkeley charges for parking and offers discounted public transit tickets to employees. AC Transit could offer free rides the first month or 25 cent rides in the middle of the day when few people are on the bus. I’m sure that someone familiar with marketing could come up with far more ideas than I could.

It will take some finesse to balance the needs of drivers, public transit users and residents, and I hope AC Transit will handle the project with grace.

Sally Levinson

•

DAILY KOS

Editors, Daily Planet:

Thanks to the Daily Planet and Richard Brenneman for the article on Daily Kos blogger Markos Moulitsas. Though I spend lots of time on my computer I don’t do the blog scene, so it was very interesting to learn about the major impact of people like Kos. I will admit some envy that a young man half my age can say that up to a million people a day read and interact with his efforts. It’s quite an achievement. As an absurd comparison, our Retro Poll alternative public opinion research group’s website (www.retropoll.org) has received a paltry 20,000 hits in three years and the satiric novel I published (though available on the Internet as well as from Berkeley local booksellers Black Oaks and Cody’s) has sold about 50 copies. How foppish.

On the other hand, Markos shows wisdom beyond his years when he projects phasing out of blogging into some other life pursuit in about five years. What I think (or hope) he intuits from his work—or we may intuit from the efforts of MoveOn.org, Working Assets’ Act for Change, Air America and others—is that regardless of the web’s popularity it will probably remain a force heavily restricted to operating within the market culture rather than a force organizing within institutions and geographic locales against that culture. The virtuality of the web “community” isn’t important to product marketeers but, for Kos and others who hope to effect substantive political and cultural change, it is an inherently co-opting factor, even when dealing with exciting ideas.

Not at all meaning to denigrate the value of the marvelous experiment that blogging reflects I think it important to recognize this limitation: that the vast majority of people—those growing ranks relegated to the bottom of a collapsing society—who need to be energized to believe in their own power and self-organized to fight for justice and democracy live most of their lives in a different world, their interaction with the market (be it the market of commodities or ideas) programmed to the role of consuming objects. That majority, in the United States as anywhere, is marvelously approachable within the realm of real life—within its institutions, cultural organizations and communities.

Marc Sapir

•

TIRED OF THE LEFTISTS

Editors, Daily Planet:

Margot Smith may be well-intentioned, but she is woefully ignorant of realities. She wonders why our working class doesn’t have the skills of illegal immigrants, buying into Bush’s notion that “illegals are doing jobs that Americans won’t do.” The truth is that undocumented people are working for slave wages which, understandably, don’t appeal to American workers who can garner more from unemployment insurance or welfare, along with medical care. Of course unemployed members of our working class would take such jobs if elite businessmen offered minimal living wages; but why should businessmen pay decent salaries when they can exploit illegal immigrants for next-to-nothing? In sum, undocumented workers have taken a terrible economic toll on minority workers with U.S. citizenship and hurt the middle and lower economic class as well with the enormous cost of social services oriented toward migrants.

Of course, Smith is one of the new breed of misguided Sandalistas—“revolution tourists” who believe they have found the next socialist paradise in Venezuela. People like Smith are all too ready to embrace the growth of literacy while ignoring the burgeoning suppression of expression in Venezuela. This is so typical, after all locals like Global Exchange are still ready to close their eyes to the tyranny of 47 years of one-man rule in Cuba.

And of course, the subject of Venezuela brings us to Chris Gilbert, who just resigned as curator of the Berkeley Art Museum. Petulant ideologue that he is, Gilbert just couldn’t understand that art should stand for itself and not be accompanied by didactic rhetoric.

Speaking of leftist swill, Israel-basher supreme, cartoonist Kalil Bendib, said at a meeting of local “progressives” that he would like more non-European art taught in Berkeley schools. Just what Berkeley needs, more dumbing down of its students with allegedly “great” Third World creations superseding the teaching of truly magnificent Western literature and art! Don’t we already have enough of such bilgewater shortchanging our students?

Dan Spitzer

Kensington

•

CODY’S BOOKS

Editors, Daily Planet:

It is too soon to accept the closing of Cody’s as inevitable. Berkeley stands to lose too much if this fine bookstore should close its doors after 50 years of service to the community and university. Those interested in developing solutions to the challenge of making it once again financially viable will meet on June 8, venue to be announced soon. In the meantime, both the city and the university need to hear from Berkeley residents, students, faculty, all those who value this fine independent bookstore, a pillar of Berkeley cultural life, that they need to play an active role in keeping Cody’s open.

Charlene M. Woodcock

•

YMCA EXPERIENCE

Editors, Daily Planet:

I was born and raised in Berkeley and went to all Berkeley public schools and now attend Berkeley City College (formerly Vista). I love reading the Daily Planet but have never written to you guys. But today I write to you because I am upset about a policy that has been put upon our youth in our very own downtown Berkeley.

I would like to inform you about a situation that happened in our own community of downtown Berkeley. On the night of Wednesday May 24, I arrived at the YMCA at 6:30 p.m. with my family. My family meaning my three young children ages 6, 3 and 1, my brother (15), and myself. As we were entering a staff member asked my brother how old he was, he replied 15. He was then told that he could not come in because teenagers were not allowed in after 6 p.m, Monday through Thursday. It is their policy. I asked if this was because they caused trouble. The staff member told me that it was because they tended to hang out. I explained to them that he wasn’t coming to hang out but to help me with my children and enjoy time together as a family. They refused. I explained to them that I was practically his guardian and made myself responsible for him. They still refused, I asked to speak to someone else. I asked this new staff member if the YMCA promoted family and community. He replied yes. So why weren’t they supporting this family? They still refused, his final words were, “If I let this one in I gotta let the next one in and then the one after that.”

Of course you can imagine the frustration I felt. Of course this is not the reason why I am writing to you. I am not trying to be a “tattle-tale,” I totally love the YMCA, but it is upsetting that the Young Mens Christian Association would not let the only young man there enter.

So are they telling young men and women to go hang out in the streets? They are discriminating against age and not promoting family or community. It was impossible to believe that they would not make an exception, or have an exception in their policy that a teenager can come in after 6 with his/her family. I think it’s great that they support and try to help the youth by letting them sell things at the snack cart they have, but what time are they giving them with their families? A youngster gets out of school at about 3, great if he wants to go work out and hang with his friends at the Y. But there are other family situations like mine, where my youngster has to wait for me to get off of work around 5; come home, gets things together to go out again and have fun as a family. All this to avoid him straying, to avoid him having to go to the street to look for what he can’t find at home. And then they tell me he can’t come in with his family.

The YMCA has a designated “Family night” on Fridays from 7-9 which we have gone to. Unfortunately Fridays are somewhat unpleasant because the facility is so crowded, and on occasions my work schedule does not permit me to make it on Fridays. I don’t know if this is a story to follow or what. Maybe you can tell me if I am over exaggerating or doing the right thing. I am not usually a complainer. But do stand up for what I believe in. I just feel hurt that a place like the YMCA, which I love so much, would make all youth pay for the acts of others, and go against there own goal of bringing family and community together.

Carmen Navarro

•

CORRECTING CHRIS

Editors, Daily Planet:

Mr. Kavanagh accuses John Blankenship of operating “in tandem” with Michael St. John and the Berkeley Property Owners Association in a “carefully calibrated campaign” to relax Berkeley’s rules against condo conversions.

As the person who has spoken the most for BPOA on this issue, I’d like to set the record straight. Mr. Blankenship is not a member of BPOA and his efforts against the current rule were unknown to me before last week. Indeed I never even met the man until after we had both spoken to the City Council on May16. Mr. St John, of course, is a member of the Housing Advisory Commission and so is known to everyone on all sides of the question.

There are wide differences between our respective approaches. It appeared to me on May 23 that Mr. Blankenship thinks smaller buildings should be exempt from the current rules. Mr. St. John says that the 12.5 percent fee ought to be calculated on capital gains on sale of a converted unit rather than on the gross sales price. BPOA’s position, which has been submitted to HAC and to the council, is that the cap on conversions should be raised so long as rental vacancies remain high, and that a reduced fee should be charged up front so that the city gets immediate income for its housing trust fund.

The petition now being circulated takes a fourth approach, in that much of the fee, instead of going to the city, would be paid to tenants wanting to own their own homes .

These suggestions are all different from each other, and don’t indicate the sort of conspiracy alleged by Mr. Kavanagh. What they do indicate is that a lot of people do agree on one thing: The current law severely restricts affordable home ownership in Berkeley, and ought to be changed.

David M. Wilson

•

CONDO RESPONSE

Editors, Daily Planet:

Thank you very much for publishing my May 16 commentary on the Condominium Conversion Ordinance. “Condo Conversion Taxes Unfair to Duplex Homeowners” would have been more accurate.

1. The new conversion assessment (fee) amounts to a sales “tax“

2. My duplex is my home, and I cannot have it without the rental.

As I said in my commentary, I and others like me, do not see ourselves as “landlords.” We live in duplexes or triplexes because of our desire to be citizens of Berkeley, our desire to have some control over our own destiny through home ownership, our pride in ownership, our joy in working with buildings (me, as an architect), but most of all because we do not have the means to own a single family house in Berkeley. In order to afford the astronomical costs of purchase, maintenance and repair, but especially Berkeley taxation, we have been forced to subsidize our costs with a rental.

Mr. Chris Kavanagh, who I have never met, and whose name I had not previously recognized, was unable to step back to admire the individual trees in the forest. This is especially distressing because he has a position on the Rent Stabilization Board. I do not have the available word count to nit pick my way through the inaccuracies and misrepresentations in Mr. Kavanagh’s May 23 letter to the editor. I also do not know from whom the man is getting his information , but he should “out” his source who is leading him astray:

1. I do not belong to the Berkeley Property Owners Association (BPOA). I have never gone to one of their meetings. I have not read their ballot initiative, although I have since this letter, gotten a copy. I have intentionally not associated myself with BPOA because my perception, rightly or wrongly, has been that they are owners of multiple large properties and have a different approach to their work than me. My business is architecture; my rental is a part of my home, and I treat it as such.

2. My “carefully calibrated campaign”? “Working in tandem with BPOA”? Is Mr. Kavanagh a conspiracy theorist? Is he trying to demonize people who don’t agree with him in the manner of Joe McCarthy?

3. Mr. St. John is on the Housing Advisory Board and as such I have contacted him and others on the commission to discuss issues raised relative to the Condominium Conversion Ordinance. Not all have returned my calls, but Mr. St. John has. I don’t always agree with Mr. St. John’s approach, nor what he has to says, and he has not picked up on many of my ideas, but he happens to be one of several thinkers on the HAC who dares bring up an original thought and is not just the voice of his city councilmember.

4. I have called and met with almost every councilmember with regard to the Condominium Conversion Ordinance, all but one of whom has returned my calls. Maybe Mr. Kavanagh can come up some with some “carefully calibrated campaign” from my council contacts as well.

5. I hope his letter does not accurately reflect his inability to see the truth behind personal statement which he must be called upon to do often in his position on the Rent Stabilization Board.

On May 15 the City Council voted in favor of a “Del Norte Marijuana Dispensary Zone,” without a public hearing or local presence. Oakland’s “Oaksterdam” district and Richmond’s Pot Shops have shown how hard it is to help chronic pain sufferers while evading potential damage to “society.” Top quality cannabis can cost more than gold. If legalized, it could be grown as easily as, say, basil. The sick clamor for “at cost” medical use attracts idealists, profiteers and attorneys. Drug companies devise new methods for medical “inhaling.” Tobacco and liquor interests ponder ways on how not to be cut out of potential profits. The State and federal legal standoff is unlikely to be resolved soon. The broader pros and cons of legalization are well beyond being a local matter.

California’s 1996 “Compassionate Use Act” has spawned a new breed of lawyers “doing well by doing good.” Our cities scramble in a variety of ways. Some opt for restrictive zoning and operational rules. Albany, with an elected city attorney, i.e. “responsible to voters rather than council,” plans an “Advisory Referendum.” Dublin wants a ban, claiming that “allowing dispensaries to operate and then placing such stringent rules on them so that they could barely operate would be hypocritical.”

Janet Coleson, El Cerrito’s city attorney, produced a “confidential” memo on this topic. In a “public” report she argues, convincingly, that the city impose a “restrictive ordinance.” She had two years in which to prepare while she tripled our legal costs over the cost of her predecessor. Did she dilly-dally? Is she now railroading the council into a “least risky option,” to find at least one suitable potential “pot zone” location? The planning department has ignored all public input and discussion, and hit upon “Del Norte.” The Planning Commission is next in line to be stampeded, so a proposed ordinance can pass its final (second) reading, before the current marijuana moratorium runs out on July 19.

Checking the dates of confidential and other memos and related invoices should reveal whether the blame is mainly our attorney’s, or if it should be shared with other staff and/or councilmembers. If it is the former, a good case can be made that the city take its time to proceed properly and prudently. In case of a lawsuit, we could demand legal protection from the attorney’s firm, at no cost. Otherwise, do some fast footwork, make up for lost time, try to evade the pot-holes, and, mainly, bring affected residents, i.e. everybody, into the decision loop. A bad ordinance puts us, in all respects, at greater risk than no ordinance. Here are the things to consider:

1. Is our historically most problematic area the best site for this latest problem? Del Norte has consumed the bulk of our redevelopment money, some $50 million to date before current obligations are paid off. What was achieved? “We got rid of the Bay Bridge motel prostitutes” is the claim. But there’s another motel close by, and dozens of casual day laborers flag down job prospects en route to Home Depot. The “Baxter Creek/Gateway Park” which we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on, is right across the street.

2. Del Norte remains a major redevelopment site. The “Olson” (Mayfair) condo plans need to be addressed; BART hopes to develop its parking lots; other sites in El Cerrito and Richmond, toward the San Pablo and MacDonald intersection, are to be developed soon, presumably with housing. Neighboring cities, that pioneered pot clubs, found out they require a lot of police attention. If El Cerrito is to have such a place, shouldn’t it be as close as possible to our police and medical emergency services?

3. “Keep the dispensary away from schools, residences, parks” sounds right. Yet the planners have managed to pick a site that, although zoned “commercial” on paper, has in its middle eleven “very low income housing units” at 5124 Wall Ave., Richmond, and a pleasant detached family home with a “children at play sign” at 5222 Wall Ave.. Will staff ever decide to first ask us locals? Consider the reality on ground rather than just from maps?

The Del Norte BART location is substantially more problem prone than 19th Street BART “Oaksterdam.” If we’re going to do this at all, it should not be done by underhanded, wimpy, manipulative railroading. Forget the “first reading” ordinance approval, it was disgraceful. Let us hear from all interested and potentially affected residents first.

My suggestion: One of the empty “Mill & Lumber” storefronts is the perfect site for a controllable, above board medical cannabis clinic, under close daily supervision of police, city hall, and “village town center” officials, to serve legitimate local users. It may even be a money-generator rather than a troublemaker, for “El Cerrito the City that Gives a Damn.”

“Blow winds, and crack your cheeks!” Nowhere else in Shakespeare are the elemental forces of nature so much in sync with primal human passions as in this tragedy of two dysfunctional families and a kingdom coming apart at the seams.

Lear and Gloucester, two hapless fathers, wander aimlessly in the clutches of a ferocious storm worthy of Katrina’s catastrophic implication: “Hurricanoes spout!”

King Lear is also one of the most difficult plays to stage successfully for qualitative reasons. Some things about the driving forces of the play—the dialectic between incident and overall perspective, cause and effect, and what’s said versus what’s performed—are such that almost imperceptible things can go awry and put the production off-course.

I’ve seen celebrated British companies present fine characterizations in interesting production plans spun out into exciting staging, and yet, somehow the show hopelessly bogs down into a string of more-or-less good and bad scenes with no real unity by the opening of the first storm scene. No wonder there are those who hold that Lear should be regarded as a reading play, for voice only, heard but not seen.

The Shotgun Players production, now up at the Ashby Stage, has two well thought-out assets: solid casting in the case of the two errant fathers (longtime associate Richard Louis James as Lear, and John Mercer as Gloucester) and an economical, fluid blocking, underpinned by brisk action and scene changes which let the plot unfold freely, the story fluently tell itself.

Co-directors Patrick Dooley and Joanie McBrien deserve credit for laying these foundations. The set by Alf Pollard—a stolid court setting of stone that can seem warm or cool, depending on the lighting (David Robertson), with an unobtrusive screen that reflects the crepuscular light of passing days or the flashes of lightning that punctuate the great, frightful exchanges during the storm to Chris Paulina’s thunderclaps—adds to the flexibility of the action spread out over various locales.

The tangle of complications, whereby a king disowns his favorite daughter and freely gives over the reins of his kingdom into the treacherous hands of a pair of jealous “evil sisters,” thereby finding himself literally out in the cold and out of his head while all parties gird up for apocalyptic battle, is presented with the simple, shocking clarity of a Grimms’ fairytale or a bad dream.

As in any good storytelling, the psychology is unstated but straightforward, the ambiguities of Shakespeare’s mannerism only opening up more perspectives as the action shifts and chaos expands.

Lear is easy prey to the sycophancy of his deceiving daughters because he is used to the flatteries of life at court, which revolves around his person. In his vanity—and here James’s portrayal is particularly good—the waspish king thinks it’s all due to his charm, his kingly aura and diplomatic mien, the sure sign of a tyrant who’s lost his grip, becoming subject to his toadies’ and his own extravagances.

In the case of Gloucester, tricked into accusing his loyal son Edgar (Dave Maier) by his scheming bastard Edmund (Benjamin Privett), the roots of his susceptibility are again transparently clear. He’s a courtier who considers himself so conventionally good, he cannot conceive of being tricked in his distraction, blustering (and Mercer’s a worthy blusterer) before his secret foes over the loss of what he held sacred, that which was lost unawares long before.

Disasters mount up, and the aggregate becomes ever more shocking in its barefaced depiction of snowballing degeneracy as seen by a crazed, self-deposed monarch, its whole far exceeding any of the grisly details of eyes plucked out, feral couplings, or disguises that overpower the character of those who put them on.

It also can fray nerves. Shakespeare’s always flirting with melodrama: if the overtones are to sound tragic, they must ring out clear; if strange, they cannot echo the tumult of the catastrophe or the storm.

It’s here that uneven casting and those almost-imperceptibles come into play to hobble what would proceed from clarity of the presentation. The cast of 15 works hard, and some with fair success, like Lear’s daughters (demure Zehra Berkman, Fontana Butterfield with deceptive grand manner, and especially simmering Trish Mulholland) or an acting-out female Fool (Katja Rivera).

But untrained, unorchestrated voices in particular become cloying or grating with one or another failure of mismatched diction, be it overly vernacular delivery or too much Shakes Festival-ese. The distress over what’s portrayed doesn’t attain escape velocity to reach the sublime orbit where parallel lines of perspective intersect, and the Bard’s elusive Truth flashes into view for an instant, as Melville once said, like a white deer fleeing, from tree to tree, through the woodlands.

KING LEAR

Presented by the Shotgun Players at 8 p.m. Thursday—Sunday through June 11 at the Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave. 841-6500.

As the general election for Oakland mayor approaches, the San Francisco Chronicle is working hard to elect Councilmember Ignacio De La Fuente and to defeat his chief rival, former Congressmember Ron Dellums.

The Chronicle endorsed De La Fuente on April 30, nearly six weeks before the June 6 election. The paper argued that De La Fuente “had the best feel for the pulse of the city,” and better understood the limitations of government.

In contrast, the Chronicle criticized Dellums for “pushing a utopian vision,” specifically his support for inclusionary housing and his commitment to “ bringing universal health care to his ‘model city.’”

The Chronicle concluded that Dellums would be qualified to be a “college president, secretary of state, or Washington lobbyist” but that De La Fuente is the “type of fully engaged, roll-up-the sleeves, answer-your–calls, prod-the-bureaucracy, pitch-the-city” mayor that Oakland needs.

Chronicle news stories that day and subsequently have been careful to mirror the identically (false) contrasts between De La Fuente and Dellums first announced by the paper’s editors.

In Christopher Heredia’s April 30 story (“Oakland Mayor Rivals Each Woo Voters in Own Particular Ways”), the candidates’ strengths are contrasted between “Dellums’ ability to inspire a crowd” and “De La Fuente’s nuts-and-bolts municipal know-how.”

The story then repeats the editorial’s view that Dellums is standoffish and utopian, saying “early on, Dellums recoiled at reporter’s questions, preferring to describe from podiums his vision of Oakland as a model city.”

Here’s some other excerpts from the Chronicle’s “news” story:

“While some have wondered whether Dellums really wants the job . . . there’s no doubt that De La Fuente wants to be mayor.”

“That plays well with some voters who aren’t convinced that Dellums’ experience in Congress means he knows how to run a city.”

“De La Fuente’s candor stands in contrast to Dellums . . .”

Two weeks later, Chronicle columnists Matier & Ross joined the Dellums-bashing. Their May 1 column, “Brooks’ city funds helped spur Dellums run,” implied that Oakland taxpayer dollars had been illegally used to benefit the Dellums campaign.

The truth is that Brooks funded a series of concerts in an Oakland Park, and at these public events members of the Oakland Black Caucus staffed a “Draft Ron Dellums” table. Brooks can be criticized for how she spends her office accounts, but Ron Dellums name has been injected into the story solely to taint his candidacy.

Last week, the Chronicle and reporter Heredia further escalated their biased news coverage (“20 days left, mayor’s race still a close call, May 17”). The article again links Dellums to having a vision of a “model city,” and says that listeners “roar” when he speaks “because he often says what they want to hear.”

While the Chronicle describes Dellums as pandering to crowds, it views De La Fuente’s follow-up to Dellums speech as “puny though heartfelt, underscoring his nuts-and–bolts style of governing.” The paper’s “objective” coverage then continues: “Whereas the former congressman offers sweeping visions of what could be, De La Fuente remains pragmatic and talks about what is.”

If this is not bad enough, Heredia then uses the old trick of finding a seemingly objective authority figure to say what the reporter (and his Chronicle editors) want. In this case the Chronicle trots out little-known Cal State Sacramento government professor Michael Selmer, who uses his “expertise” to make the following unsubstantiated comments: “Dellums to some degree expected to be anointed without a fight. I suspect he is somewhat surprised that it hasn’t occurred that way . . . His (Dellums’) campaign is showing some cracks. Dellums has shown he lacks municipal government experience, but it’s clear De La Fuente and Nadel know how to get things done and have offered detailed plans for doing so . . . He (Dellums) has a belief that a lot of the issues in Oakland can be solved with more money, and he has no idea where that money is going to come from.”

I tried to ask Michael Selmer what the basis was for his strong anti-Dellums conclusions, but he was unavailable at his campus number. Reporter Heredia told me via e-mail that he used Selmer as an expert on Oakland politics because he was a “poli sci professor who lives in Alameda and is watching the race.”

And it’s just a coincidence that the professor chosen as the Chronicle’s political expert on the Oakland mayor’s race views Ron Dellums with the same hostility as the paper’s editorial Board.

Right.

It’s time the San Francisco Chronicle to stopped manipulating the news to elect its favored candidates.

Clean is a film about picking up the pieces and putting them back together, about kicking a drug habit, about winning back the love of one’s child, about forgiveness and compassion, and almost every other road-to-redemption cliché you can think of. And yet somehow it succeeds.

Other films have portrayed the shattered lives of drug addicts to much greater effect, and many films, as well as countless TV specials, have followed the efforts of down-and-out mothers to regain custody of their children. Clean does not add much to the genre. But what makes it worth the ticket price, quite simply, is the cast. Maggie Cheung and Nick Nolte manage to take a tired tale and infuse it with dignity and humanity.

Cheung plays Emily, a recovering drug addict trying to rebuild her life so that one day she might be able to take care of her young son. Nolte, along with Martha Henry in another excellent performance, play the parents of Emily’s lover, an obscure musician whose overdose leaves their child permanently in the care of his grandparents.

The film was written and directed by Cheung’s husband Olivier Assayas, who created the role specifically for her. And though Assayas is to be commended for his casting instincts, much of his direction leaves something to be desired.

There is no individual scene that is particularly compelling, no moment where the film sinks its hooks into you. In fact, the pace is somewhat slow, at times plodding, taking far too much time in getting where we already know it’s going. It’s meant to be a simple film about a woman’s everyday life, and life is not exactly chock-full of dramatic moments, but still the film can be a bit tedious. The appeal of the movie grows steadily, however, as the characters become more sympathetic and more convincing.

What Clean does well is track the progress and the setbacks Emily experiences as she makes a series of good and bad decisions en route to an uncertain future. The film does not use the same approach as the graphic drug movies of recent memory, like Trainspotting or Requiem For a Dream, with gruesome scenes of drug ingestion and physical decay; drug use is not really the subject matter here. Rather, Assayas takes a simpler, more accessible route, showing the step-by-painful-step process a woman must undergo in order to piece her life back together—a process that is not full of momentous catastrophes, but instead consists of small measures of success amid a series of events that gradually chip away at her resolve. Friends shun her; former acquaintances demonstrate a lack of faith in her; opportunities seem to vanish as quickly as they appear. At a time when she is most in need of a helping hand, she finds that she has alienated virtually everyone who could lend one.

Some of Assayas’ directorial techniques are a bit threadbare. Jump cuts and handheld cameras have their place, but they’re all too common these days. There are a couple of scenes where these devices are very effective—as a panicked Emily searches through a crowd, for instance—but for the most part they’ve become a simple and uninspired method by which indie filmmakers declare their indieness. In this case, the strategy often backfires, with the constantly moving camera and disjointed editing only distracting us from the compelling performances of Nolte and Cheung.

The soundtrack too relies heavily on current trends, using much of the same sort of moody electronica that was featured in—thought not pioneered by—such recent semi-indie films as Lost in Translation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

However, the simplicity and humanity of the movie manages to overcome the obstacles created by these somewhat trite aesthetic flourishes. It is an optimistic film, and one that bears a hopeful and unfortunately necessary message: that given a chance and a bit of compassion, people can change, and that a small act of kindness can go a long way in alleviating the pain of making one’s way through an indifferent world.

After a year and a half of listening to many perspectives and extensive deliberations, the Creeks Task Force (CTF) has carefully crafted a set of recommendations to revise the Creeks Ordinance that respects private property owners’ interests and protects the natural environment. (See www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ planning/landuse/creeks). The CTF Recommendations are now before the City Council.

The original Creeks Ordinance, passed by the council in 1989, established a 30-foot setback requirement from the centerline of an open creek for new roofed structures. The ordinance also banned further culverting of creeks and encouraged daylighting of creeks. A subsequent city attorney opinion found that culverted creeks were also covered by the ordinance. The city attorney’s position is that culverted creeks are the responsibility of property owners. Neither the original ordinance nor subsequent opinions were communicated adequately to affected property owners. The original creeks ordinance provided for the rebuilding of homes more than 50 percent lost or destroyed built within a 30-foot setback if a variance was obtained. At a city council meeting in September 2004, the City Council voted to change this to rebuild by right within existing zoning ordinance provisions.

Based on input from creek property owners, creek protection advocates, scientists, and other jurisdictions, the CTF agreed to 13 statements that can be summarized as follows: importance of creeks as an inter-connected drainage system; need to treat underground creek culverts differently than open creeks; encouraging creek daylighting on a voluntary basis; 30-foot from a creek centerline is an area of interest; people should be able to rebuild destroyed or damaged buildings; existing structures within the 30-foot setback area may be repaired, renovated and maintained within the current footprint.

These statements of agreement translate into the following regulatory revisions:

• Keep the 30-foot setback requirement from the creek centerline for new roofed structures.

• Although still in the Creeks Ordinance, culverted creeks would be treated similarly to storm drains for purposes of setbacks for safety, access and maintenance and handled administratively by engineering staff in Public Works Department. Any setbacks for culverted creeks would be determined on a case-by-case basis. The 30-foot setback would apply only to open creeks.

• Allow vertical expansions of structures within 30 feet of the creek centerline with an environmental analysis showing that the expansion will not adversely affect the creek. Horizontal expansions of buildings within 25 feet of the creek centerline would not be allowed without a variance, but building out between 25-30 feet would be allowed with an administrative use permit (AUP) and environmental analysis.

• New decks, currently not regulated, would not be allowed within 10 feet of the creek centerline, but new decks and replacement or rebuilt decks would be allowed within 10-30 feet of the creek centerline with environmental analysis.

• Only paving for footpaths and bridges is allowed within 10 feet of a creek centerline. However, pervious or permeable surfaces within 10-30 feet of a creek centerline would be allowed. Impervious surfaces would not be allowed within 30 feet of the creek centerline at all. Bridges would be built with a clear span necessary to pass a one-in-100-year storm event.

These proposed regulatory revisions represent a delicate balance between private property owners’ interests and the need to protect creeks in a densely populated urban area. On the one hand, private property owners would have the flexibility to build up or down if their house were within the 30-foot setback as well as building up to five-foot out into the setback area with appropriate procedures. Furthermore, those living in a house over a culverted creek would no longer be subject to the 30-foot setback requirement for open creeks but would be subject to engineering staff review in the Public Works Department. On the other hand, a new setback requirement for bridges and decks as well as for pervious-only pavement within the setback area would be established.

In arriving at these recommendations, the CTF discussed several issues in depth. First, the CTF decided to keep the current 30-foot-from-the-centerline setback requirement rather than adopting a case-by-case approach because they thought the latter would be more confusing to the public and more difficult to administer. Furthermore, a case-by-case approach could be inconsistent and might result in inadequate riparian protection.

Second, the CTF supported the property owners’ ability to rebuild damaged or destroyed homes within the setback area; however, the CTF felt that property owners should be subject to the same requirement for a Use Permit from the Zoning Adjustments Board as any other (legally) nonconforming structure. The council this week sent this issue to the Planning Commission.

Third, the CTF debated the issue of whether culverted creeks should continue to be regulated under the Creeks Ordinance or taken out altogether. Two reasons why the CTF decided to leave culverted creeks in the ordinance: 1) transition zones—where culverted creeks enter an open creek—need to be regulated by the Creeks Ordinance; and 2) culverted creeks are all part of an interconnected drainage system, e.g. the watershed. The bottom line is that CTF recommendations would treat culverted creeks as storm drains and the 30-foot setback requirement would not apply. In essence, the CTF is recommending that the city return to the original creeks ordinance that applied only to open creeks.

Another issue the CTF addressed was that of adequate notice. In reviewing the history of the Creeks Ordinance, the original ordinance and subsequent interpretations were not adequately communicated to affected property owners. The CTF therefore recommends that the City of Berkeley notify all affected property owners as identified by the city of the approved changes to the Creeks Ordinance as well as advance notice of any future proposed changes.

Although the CTF was specifically prohibited from dealing with the issue of financial liability for failing culverts due to on-going litigation, they agreed that the city should be looking for other sources of funding. One possibility—and this is my own opinion—is for the city to consider a possible ballot measure to improve both failing culverts AND inadequate storm drains which have led to flooding this winter in parts of the city. The culverts and storm drains are all part of the city’s overall antiquated drainage system and need to be repaired over time.

Thousands of volunteer, staff and consultant hours as well as extensive input from the public and lengthy deliberations have gone into the CTF recommendations. They represent a delicate and hard-won compromise between property owners‚ interests and creek protection values. When the City Council takes this matter up on May 30, they should support in full the CTF recommendations to revise an outmoded creeks ordinance to meet today’s realities.

Helen Burke is the chair of the Creeks Task Force. The views expressed here are her own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Creeks Task Force.

Pacific Film Archive’s “A Theater Near You” series is a showcase for films that don’t make it to your local megaplex. This week PFA is featuring an encore screening of Baby Face, the notorious 1933 Pre-Code film that for decades was only seen in a heavily censored version. A negative of the original version was discovered in 2004 and the restored film has been circulating for about a year in advance of its upcoming DVD release.

Seeing the complete version is a revelation, for not only is it just as salacious as it was long rumored to be, it is also a truly great film. It made the rounds of Bay Area theaters last year, playing at the Castro Theater and the Balboa Theater as well as PFA. But the seats filled up so quickly at the PFA screening that they’ve brought it back for another engagement.

The film shows at 7 p.m. Friday and again at 5:30 p.m. Sunday. Though it will be available on home video soon enough, this funny, cynical melodrama deserves to be seen with an audience.

Hollywood began enforcing the Production Code in early 1930s, establishing strict rules of morality on motion pictures in an attempt to put an end to the perceived hedonism that had run rampant during the silent era and during the first few years of talkies.

Pre-Code usually refers to films made and released before the enforcement of the Production Code, movies that generally contain a great deal more sex, crime and assorted vice than the censored films that followed. But Baby Face is among a rather unique class of Pre-Code films in that it was created before the Code, yet released during the Code’s enforcement. Therefore the film, made under the old rules, was subjected to the new rules before it could be released.

The result was that the censors took an uncompromising and sordid tale and sanitized it as much as possible. Shots were removed; scenes were toned down; new dialogue was recorded; a new ending was tacked on; and one character’s identity and purpose were entirely reconfigured.

The new print also features a coda in which the closing credits are followed by a few of the censors’ edits. Seen in context, these changes are particularly hilarious and poorly conceived, transforming a dark and interesting film into run-of-the-mill Hollywood tripe.

The story concerns one Lily Powers, played by Barbara Stanwyck. Her father runs a speakeasy that caters to steel workers and he makes a little extra money on the side as his daughter’s pimp. Previously excised shots from these early scenes show the father pocketing cash from a local politician in exchange for time alone with Lily, as well as a point-of-view shot as the politician ogles her, the camera moving slowly up the length of her body, lingering at particular points of interest before settling on her jaded and weary face.

Desperate to escape this bleak existence, Lily seeks guidance from a local cobbler who offers ruthless advice, quoting Nietzsche and encouraging her to use and exploit men in pursuit of her desires.

Eventually she makes her way to the big city and does just that, taking a job in the mail room of a bank. She starts on the first floor and begins methodically seducing and destroying men who can further her interests. Each conquest is followed by a pan up the side of the building, pulling back from a window on one floor and pushing toward a window on a higher floor, illustrating Lily’s rise up the corporate ladder. Nothing subtle here: Lily’s sleeping her way to the top.

These are just a few examples of the sort of gleeful frankness Baby Face evinces, treating shady topics with wry cynicism. The crucial ingredient is Stanwyck. Her Lily is smart, cynical and cruel, a hard-luck dame brimming with ambition and a smoldering and dangerous sexuality. The powerful men she sets her eyes on have no chance against her; her withering glances and callous manipulation leave them stammering and defenseless. A young John Wayne even makes an appearance—several years before cementing his reputation as a swaggering tough guy—as a diffident office boy who makes an inept attempt to get a second date with Lily after she has already exhausted his usefulness.

The irony of the film is that the censors really didn’t need to alter the ending. Though the movie is full of sex and cruelty, Lily Powers really does learn something at the end, demonstrating her humanity and compassion, even without the Code’s prodding.

But apparently that wasn’t enough; they added an extra scene to further delineate her fate, and the inclusion of this scene after the closing credits in the new print brings the misogyny of the Code quickly into focus for modern audiences: Stay home girls, or somebody’s gonna get hurt.

The “David Brower Center and Oxford Plaza,” intended to replace the city-owned parking lot at Oxford Street and Allston Way, recently received a key City Council endorsement. That’s noteworthy because this six-story development embodies admirable environmental and housing-equity goals.

Also, because you’ll be paying for it for a long, long time.

This Brower Center project’s cost has skyrocketed over budget faster than a Pentagon contract. Subsidizing it has already eaten up much of the city’s housing funds—displacing more practical proposals.

And because this misconceived prestige project’s nonprofit developers have no collateral, the funder of last resort for future cost overruns is: us. Taxpayers. So let’s take a look at this folly, and the many layers of irony that underlie it. It’s a rare case study of how everything that can go wrong in Berkeley planning, sometimes does.

Irony No. 1 is the Brower Center’s origins. Back in the 1990s, Berkeley’s most vigorous private developer—and some smaller imitators—figured out a sure formula for tricking city officials into approving buildings that were misplaced, too large for their surrounding zoning, and too skimpy on parking (therefore cheap to build).

First, give the building a pseudo-ecological name memorializing whatever wild spirit it offended. (Much as exurban developers name their subdivisions “Deer Creek” after they’ve destroyed deer habitat and creeks.) Second, “greenwash” the structure by making exaggerated claims about its alleged environmental benefits. Finally, throw in a dollop of affordable housing, to help offset the city’s bungling of state authority for comprehensive rent stabilization. (Everyone likes to pay low rent.)

After getting tricked into approving several of these oversized developments, city councilmembers and commissioners began to hate themselves. They realized they could stop being tricked by private developers.

They could just use the same formula to trick themselves.

Thus, they cooked up the “Brower Center.” It would be named after Berkeley native David Brower—the giant “Archdruid” of modern environmentalism who rebuilt the Sierra Club, then founded at least three other significant environmental groups.

It would offer subsidized office space to green groups, whose officers were happy to endorse it. (They were tired of commuting to San Francisco. Plus, everyone likes to pay low rent.)

It would provide more than a dollop of affordable housing. And it would displace one of downtown Berkeley’s last surface parking lots—a sight that the car-haters behind this project couldn’t abide.

Irony No. 2 was naming this behemoth development after David Brower. As a longtime Sierra Club member, I finally got my first (and last) chance to hear the Archdruid speak a few months before his death in 2000. His speech included the reflection, “My life has been one giant fight against developers.”

Brower’s other lectures regularly included a more pointed epigram: “I’d like to declare open season on developers. Not kill them, just tranquilize them.” If the Archdruid were alive to see what Berkeley is doing for developers in his name, he’d spin in his grave like a wind turbine.

Irony No. 3 is what we’ll lose by building the Brower Center. Some of the last breathing room beside the UC campus will be replaced by yet another tall structure. A friend calls this progressive hemming-in of the campus’ remaining green space “like building medieval ramparts.”

Although parking lots might not win environmental certifications, they are a form of open space. And building on the Oxford Lot will kill several graceful, mature eucalyptus trees. The great urban-planning theorist Joni Mitchell anticipated these losses in her 1970 musical dissertation “Big Yellow Taxi” (lyrics slightly altered): Don’t it always seem to go / That you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone / We paved Paradise / And gave up a parking lot

Taxpayers will indeed give up this public land to developers—for free—in return for a promise to restore the public parking underground. We’ll also forfeit parking revenue for an estimated “two years” of construction (which is likely to mean much longer).

Irony No. 4 is one Berkeley invention that won’t win a Nobel Prize: the car-free parking lot. When told that their new office/cultural and housing/retail complex would generate many new vehicle trips per day, the Brower Center’s car-hating authors were adamant about replacing only the Oxford Lot’s current 105 or so parking spaces.

Downtown merchants pleaded for a second underground parking level, with an equal number of new spaces. They said that downtown had lost some 600-800 parking spaces since 1995. But they got nowhere.

Irony No. 5 is how the city’s “Transportation” Commission responded a year ago to bad news about that car-free parking lot. Consultants estimated that the new buildings would generate up to 97 additional vehicle trips per day. The commission responded by reaffirming the one-level limit. (This commission’s name always belongs in quotes, because Berkeley has a “Transportation” Commission the way Orwell’s Airstrip One had a Ministry of “Truth.”)

One level of underground parking is what six city councilmembers endorsed this May 16. Adult supervision by staff did at least add 41 new surface parking spaces to serve the 97 new units of housing. Meaning that everyone loses: the car-haters will have killed only a net 64 of the surface spaces they despise.

Irony No. 6 is how our City Council made this project’s two proposed buildings—rising six stories and four stories, respectively—conform to existing zoning that limited them to three stories. Inspired by David Brower, did they fearlessly force developers to bend to the popular will?

Nah. They just changed the zoning.

Irony No. 7 is who will end up occupying this monument to city groupthink: city staff reported on May 16 that to help fill in the project’s bottomless cost overruns, the office tower’s tenants might not be subsidized environmental nonprofits at all. They might be for-profit businesses that can claim some tenuous link to environmentalism or “social equity,” plus UC departments. And every square foot leased to UC goes off the tax rolls, costing taxpayers even more.

Any questions?

The “David Brower Center” may yet be canceled as its financial improbability becomes more obvious. But if it is built, it will serve the same function as those “Deer Creek” subdivisions: It will forever exile the Archdruid’s pesky, uncompromising spirit from his birthplace.

Columnist J. Douglas Allen-Taylor is to be commended for devoting attention to the situation in the Oakland schools. It is unfortunate that he did not take the trouble to check his facts and ask for comments from the people directly involved before committing his thoughts to print. His grand conspiracy theory, in which the Oakland schools crisis was just a pretext for an alleged land grab, would not have survived performance of these basic journalistic obligations.

Perhaps I should be flattered by Allen-Taylor’s scenario, in which I play the role of evil mastermind, engineering a vast statewide fiscal crisis, manipulating the governor to cut school budgets, pulling the strings in the mayor’s office to have my opponents appointed to the school board, and cunningly remote-controlling the Oakland district to take a path of fiscal irresponsibility and ruin, all for the purpose of helping an unknown developer to realize a speculative profit on the sale of district real estate nearly 20 years later. I never realized I had so much power or foresight.

The reality is much less glamorous. The Oakland district has had serious administrative problems for many decades. The statewide fiscal crisis and the governor’s Prop. 98 budget cuts stressed every school district in the state, and none more so than in the high-cost Bay Area. (Four out of the seven district bankruptcies in the state occurred in the Bay Area.) Oakland’s response to the crisis was politically seductive but economically perilous. The Oakland district undertook a series of expensive reforms without asking where the money would come from to pay for them.

Instead of frankly disclosing the resulting budgetary problems, as it was required to do by law, the Oakland administration chose to paper them over. It submitted budget documents to the county office that appeared to comply with all requirements. Under then existing state law, as the Oakland administration knew, the county office had no power to override local control so long as the papers looked proper.

A key battle during this period was the Oakland administration’s effort to divert school construction bond money, authorized by the voters for repairing and building schools, to patch its operating deficit. The state Attorney General ruled that school construction money could not lawfully be used for operating expenses. If the Oakland administration had got its way and diverted that money, no school construction bond measure could ever again win the confidence of voters.

In the fall of 2002, the house of cards that the Oakland administration had built finally collapsed. The district stood in immediate danger of not being able to meet its payroll. At that point, state law permitted the county office to step in. The rest is history. The district’s real budget was so deeply in the red that it would have bankrupted the whole county. Only the state had the resources to bail the Oakland school district out.

An independent audit of Oakland’s books, completed two years later, found that the district had misrepresented the true financial position of its general fund; hidden a $31 million deficit; made unrealistic projections for savings in personnel expenditures four to five times the average amount in previous years; failed to provide documentation for this estimate; falsely affirmed to its board and to the county office that it had balanced its budget and was financially solvent; had inadequate internal controls over many of its operations creating an environment ripe for fraud or other inappropriate activities; illegally transferred $14 million in building funds to the general fund to reduce the deficit; and improperly used a portion of the interest of $15 million bond fund for general maintenance operations contrary to the purpose of the bond measure – among other improprieties.

Currently on the table, if news reports are to be believed, is a proposal to sell or lease a portion of Oakland Unified School District real estate in order to pay down the state loan and speed up Oakland’s return to local control. The county office has no jurisdiction over this matter, has not been consulted, and plays no role in deciding it. I have lived in Oakland for 30 years; I have been an Oakland City Council member and a member of the School Board. I am strongly in favor of a return to local control, but only if the transition is made via an open, public process.

Oakland is too large and dynamic a community to remain long under state administration. Oakland will find a way, perhaps very soon, to return to local control. However, in order to get there, Oakland will have to turn its back on the coterie of frustrated politicos who imagine themselves the victims of fantastic conspiracies, and who have nothing to offer but reruns of the tired old blame game.

Berkeley Unified School District and the supportive Berkeley community modeled the importance of focusing on solutions in order to move forward. When BUSD was grappling with its own fiscal challenges, there was honest dialog over policies, issues, and ideas to improve education for all students. Although BUSD board members often embrace opposing viewpoints, they are in agreement that a sound budget is critical to a stable district. They keep their constituents informed and garner the public support necessary to make difficult decisions. Board members and Superintendent have worked consistently and collaboratively with ACOE business staff and the fiscal advisor I appointed and currently have a fiscally sound budget.

Much can be learned from Berkeley’s example. Instead of scripting B-grade movie plots, Allen-Taylor could help all of us by turning his powerful imagination to visualizing creative and realistic scenarios for Oakland’s recovery.

In the United Nations, to celebrate their 60th anniversary in September, 2005, 150 heads of state agreed that there should be a new peace-building commission. We, as Women for Peace, applaud this effort and commit our energies to this goal. In particular, we want to see all the troops and private security withdrawn from Iraq by June, 2006. We want to see the closure of all bases, the release of all prisoners not already charged with crimes, and the phase-out of foreign contractors.

To aid in this effort, we recommend the employment by the UN Commission of a panel of internationally respected experts in peace building. This panel would have the responsibility of assessing the current situation and developing a comprehensive plan for restoring peace and a reasonable quality of life in Iraq. Clearly such a process of restoration will take considerable time and resources. An appropriate and effective way to support the United Nations’ peace building efforts would be for the United States to redirect a portion of the vast sums currently being spent on the war to the newly formed peace-building commission. Other countries may then be persuaded to cooperate in restoring Iraq.

The U.S. withdrawal from Iraq will end, or at least substantially reduce, the violence. The existing civil strife may go on, but we must stop American occupation and let the Iraqis rule themselves.

Tobey Wiebe

www.womenforpeace.org

•

CODY’S AND COMMUNITY

Editors, Daily Planet:

Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue will soon be past history, a victim of one or more of the varying possibilities variously offered this week by owner Andy Ross, by an oddly self-serving Daily Planet editorial, and by any number of fellow citizens in Planet letters to the editor, coffeehouse conversations, and e-mails. The loss is enormous. Cody’s was (and I wince at typing the past tense) a great store that provided not only an incomparable inventory, but a reliable and astonishing array of international authors presenting their books. For years Cody’s also sold tickets without charge for literary and political events throughout the Bay Area that were sponsored by KPFA Radio and numerous other non-profit organizations. Cody’s provided copious other services that all too clearly came to be taken for granted by far too many residents whose lazy buying habits and prolonged abandonment of a few blocks of Telegraph massively have undervalued more than one great community resource.

Cody’s is a self-proclaimed independent bookstore that isn’t really independent. It was dependent on all the publishers, writers and artists for its inventory, and it was dependent on its customers for its existence. As are all our other “independent” bookstores. Their owners and staffs need to know this simple truth, and we need to recognize and respond to it—if we are to have such authentic community resources shaped by this community, and protected by it. Don’t let the valued commons be degraded. Buy books in Berkeley. Be a caring member of this unique community.

Andy Ross says it was “a family business.” He’s entitled. For many of us, I’m thinking, that family is a much larger one than he realizes.

Bob Baldock

20 years at Moe’s,

Black Oak Books’ co-founder,

KPFA Public Events Producer

•

TAKE THE BUS!

Editors, Daily Planet:

You. Don’t just get into your car again. Take the bus! Check it out. AC Transit has well planned routes. Find the ones near your house and see where they go. By the simple act of getting out of your car you can relieve stress, air pollution, war, road rage, runoff and global warming. Enjoy leisurely looking out the window, people watching and walking rather than circling in your car for parking.

It costs a little more that it should but I feel good about donating to the place I feel can most improve our quality of life. (And it’d really save you money if you can arrange a car free life.) Buses are usually on time, drivers are friendly and competent and the bus goes near most places. The one thing that AC Transit sorely lacks is you! It is absurd to sit in an empty bus surrounded by SUV’s with one person. (Tilden Park had traffic jams and exhaust last Sunday while the bus was empty.) Take the bus and we’ll all arrive sooner and healthier.

Terri Compost

•

BERKELEY: CLOSED FOR

BUSINESS

Editors, Daily Planet:

Tom Bates is up for re-election.

That’s the only reason for all of the Fix Telegraph Avenue (part 17) nonsense.

People just don’t come to Berkeley to shop anymore because parking has disappeared (by city mandate) and it’s so much easier to drive to Emeryville, El Cerrito and the exception to the rule, Fourth Street (which does have parking—for now).

The Berkeley mantra “Public Transportation—Public Transportation—Public Transportation” is the dream of fools and the main reason Berkeley is becoming a commercial ghost town. Like it or not most people like to drive and that is not going to change, gas prices hikes or no.

The Act 1&2 Theater just closed and you can bet another movie theater will close next year. The auto dealers are leaving town soon.

Welcome to Berkeley—Closed for Business!

F. Greenspan

•

CORRECTION

Editors, Daily Planet:

While you know we appreciate the free publicity and Berkeley street cred that comes with having the cafe on the front page of the Daily Planet, I just wanted to remind you that (despite popular belief) we are still in North Oakland and are not (nor have we ever been) in South Berkeley.

Gabriel Frazee

Manager

Nomad Cafe

•

CARELESS

Editors, Daily Planet:

Your May 16 editorial “Don’t Blame Telly for Cody’s Woes” romanticizes the Avenue and brushes aside the problems on the street as merely being the “rowdy edge” that has always been there. You posture about “free speech” instead of trying to address the balance of interests that sensible policy would require. You label Cody’s as ignorant of the Internet although you yourself are ignorant about Cody’s website that allows information to be accessed on a million books. Finally, you practically gloat over the supposition that advertising in the Planet might have made a difference in Cody’s fortunes.

Both in content and tone, your column reflects oversimplification, carelessness with facts, arrogance and superciliousness. You are graceless in ignoring the contribution that Cody’s has made to Berkeley as a source of good books, a cultural center at which important issues are discussed, and a business that is kind to its customers with substantial discounts of which you also know nothing.

Stanley Lubman

•

DEMOCRATIZE THE REGENTS

Editors, Daily Planet:

Imagine our public institution of higher learning as a positive asset to the community. The libraries would be open to all, they would buy books through our treasured local book stores, they would subsidize the public transit system (instead of buying and running their own private empty buses!). They would act like a good citizen in city planning rather than an imperial invader. And the Board of Regents would fire anyone caught lining the pockets of the top brass at the expense of students, professors, workers, the public and the integrity of the university.

And then there’s the deeper issues: A real public good university would have open intellectual and public review before, and likely preventing, the building of a nano-technology lab next to a tritium releasing lab on a major earthquake fault. It would deny deals with the biotechnology industry that render the university useless in fairly assessing the dangers to health and environment that this powerful science can release. It would treasure Gill tract for organic sustainable agricultural studies. And it would get out of the nuclear weapon making business.

The university is rotten from the top. The regents can’t correct the problem they are the problem! David Nadel had a radical idea: democratize the regents. Fire them all and let the people elect who we want to run our university.

Cyndi Johnson

•

EDUCATION

Editors, Daily Planet:

I hear all the time that California schools don’t fare well in national educational tests. I wonder why school superintendents and other educators don’t want students to take the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE).

Teaching is an art. Not all credential holders are able to motivate students equally. A teacher who knows the art of teaching will make self-learners out of students. Such a teacher will identify each student’s strengths and interests and build on those. All students have natural gifts but many students need to be taught how to use these gifts to become better learners.

Making a difference to the life of young learners is a deep and meaningful vocation. Let the State of California recognize and encourage those teachers who have mastered the art of teaching.

I would request the family of educators to bring the academic standards of all enrolled students to the highest level of total health (physical, emotional, intellectual and inner self). The CAHSEE can motivate teachers to pour their best into teaching.

Bates claims the deal he made with the university over its Long Range Development Plan “allows our community a real voice in future university development”—an outrageous statement. The settlement agreement actually gives the university a measure of control over Berkeley’s downtown, as well as many residential areas near downtown, “regardless of ownership.” Did he bother to read this document before signing it?

Bates quotes a San Francisco Chronicle editorial, published shortly after the agreement was revealed to the public, suggesting that the agreement “could serve as a model for many other California communities….” He fails to mention that subsequently, a group of citizens sued him and the five City Council members who approved it. Perhaps lawsuits against the city are so prevalent that he fails to even notice them (another day, another lawsuit).

If he wants to know what people think about secret deals and the sell-out of the community, Bates should attend fewer selected task forces, and more meetings with neighbors, who would be delighted to let him know how they feel.

Gale Garcia

•

CONDO CONVERSIONS

Editors, Daily Planet:

In his May 16 commentary (“Condo Conversions Fee Bad for Landlords”), John Blankenship misses the proverbial forest for the trees.

Mr. Blankenship claims to want “affordable ownership opportunities” for Berkeley rental property owners by lowering or removing the city fee required to convert rental units into condominiums, but he says nothing about the crushing, unaffordable rent burden placed upon many of Berkeley’s renters. Nor does he mention that conversions will lead to the permanent removal of what remains of the city’s affordable rental housing stock.

According to the 2000 Census, 40 percent of tenant households across Berkeley received an income UNDER $20,000, while the median tenant household income stood at approximately $27,000 citywide.

Berkeley rent levels are some of the highest in the nation. Affordable housing opportunities for renters is a much more pressing concern at the moment. For this reason, Berkeley’s Rent Stabilization (or Control) Program is crucial to maintaining existing rent level affordability and—most important—rent level predictability.

During the 1999-2002 dot-com surge, for example, rent controlled units shielded most Berkeley renters from the dramatic—and unexpected—rent level increases that swept across the Bay Area at the time.

Mr. Blankenship’s commentary is part of a carefully calibrated campaign now underway to set in motion the attempted dismantlement of Berkeley’s long-established condominium conversion public policy. In an earlier op-ed page commentary, Michael St. John also assailed the city’s conversion policy.

Working in tandem with Mr. Blankenship and Mr. St Clare, the Berkeley (Rental) Property Owners Association is currently circulating a petition to place a rental unit conversion measure on Berkeley’s November ballot. This ballot measure—if it qualifies and passes—would permit the conversion of hundreds and hundreds of affordable rental units into condominiums across Berkeley.

Like Berkeley and San Francisco, more than 200 California cities have passed rental unit conversion restrictions. The reason for these conversion limits is self-evident: Converting rental units into condominiums permanently removes affordable and moderate level units from a city’s housing stock. This imposes hardship and displacement upon low and middle income residents, especially working families, single parents, seniors, disabled and those on fixed incomes among others.

Chris Kavanagh

•

SELAWSKY’S DERBY VOTE

Editors, Daily Planet:

Once again, School Boardmember John Selawsky has cast a vote on the Derby Street field issue, an issue in which he has very close personal and political interests.

Though the local and state Fair Campaign Practices rules can be surprisingly hard to nail down, technically, Mr. Selawsky is right: His house is outside the 500-foot mark that is used locally as the conflict-of-interest boundary, by about 150 feet.

But I think most voters would agree that the spirit of the rules is to avoid both real and perceived conflicts of interest, and Mr. Selawsky clearly violates that spirit whenever he votes or works with and lobbies other city officials on the Derby Street issue.

And, of course, the contacts with City Council members raise the same questions his votes do: Is he speaking as a Derby Street neighbor, a politician serving his home base and future ambitions, a School Board member who was elected in a citywide vote, not a vote of one small district?

Mr. Selawsky—especially when he’s on the defensive—is good at coming up with rationales for his actions; he’s very good at the detailed and seemingly irrefutable argument. But when you stand back from the polished logic, the duck is still walking like a duck and talking like a duck, and still a conflict of interest.

It is always disappointing when progressives play the same games for which they regularly excoriate their foes. Mr. Selawsky should recuse himself from this issue.

Several articles in the press over the past year, most recently in the May 9 Daily Planet, have called continuing attention to the “mismanagement” of the Berkeley Public Library. I write, as chair of the Board of Library Trustees (BOLT), to inform the community that the library remains a vital, vibrant community institution with a dedicated staff and a focus on serving the needs of the public. The library is on sound fiscal footing, within the limits of our budget. Comprehensive planning for the next several years has been instituted and community feedback is being sought on a variety of proposed initiatives.

Many of the articles in the press have focused on allegations regarding certain conflicts between staff and management at the library. These are personnel matters involving specific individuals and it is inappropriate for BOLT to issue public comment about them. We have therefore held our collective voice and have not responded. We have processes in place for considering and evaluating these claims and we want to assure the public that we are undertaking a serious review of them. Unfortunately, as they involve employees’ individual rights, those processes do not provide for public scrutiny of details during the evaluation. I do want to address in this commentary some of the issues that have been percolating over the past year.

Library budget

Financially, the library, due to careful management, is on solid ground. There is an operating surplus for fiscal 2006 and the fiscal 2007 budget proposes an increase in library services citywide. We are considering opening additional hours at Central and the branches, adding additional staff, and implementing certain technological services. Our budget review process continues through the adoption of the budget at the June meeting.

Union charges

SEIU 535, one of the unions representing library workers, has publicly raised allegations of retaliatory disciplinary actions against workers who have advocated on behalf of the union. The board has referred these specific allegations to the city attorney’s office for a complete review and has directed staff to comply with the city attorney’s investigation of the complaint.

Radio frequency identification

From the comments we have gotten at BOLT meetings, it is apparent that we need to continue the public discussion about the radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. Although we did not hold a separate public forum before the Board vote on RFID in 2004, the consideration of the issues surrounding the addition of RFID took place over several monthly public meetings before the Board voted to approve the use of the tags. The decision to approve RFID was made carefully and thoughtfully and only after the board and the staff had performed due diligence. Despite what you might hear, RFID is NOT a substitute for people at the library. We never intended to replace our irreplaceable library staff with machines. It is, rather, an attempt to eliminate repetitive injury of front desk staff, ease processing of increased limits on checkouts (which the public has cheerfully adopted and utilized) and dramatically increase the ability of front desk staff to offer personal guidance and support to library patrons. The public should know that over 60 percent of checkouts in April were processed through the RFID system. This represents a solid public acceptance. The board continues to consider best practices in the use of RFID and takes seriously the concerns raised in the public discussion about the use of library resources to establish this system. Our conclusion was, and is, that RFID is a useful, additional tool and that it can be implemented without invading our privacy rights and security.

Labor-management committee

The board established an ad hoc committee to consider labor-management issues arising from the workplace and service to the public. A committee of seven was appointed and weekly meetings began to take place in February. The committee identified several matters to address and began investigation of the first few items. At the end of March, the union members unilaterally withdrew from the work of the committee, citing an ongoing disciplinary matter (not involving the committee per se) with which they did not agree. The committee has not met since. On the other hand, the Shelving Task Force, formed by this committee, composed of staff from a variety of classifications, worked together to formulate data and conclusions which have contributed to our staffing and budget considerations for the next fiscal year.

News about the library

The positive news about the library these days, on the other hand, deserves to be placed within the public arena. Examples include:

• The Central Library has reopened between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. each Sunday so that it is now open 7 days a week downtown.

• There are 1.6 million library materials, including books, CDs and DVDs, available for circulation

• Programming continues to be strong, including the Monday night Berkeley History program at Central in April and May and Children’s Day/Book Day on April 30 by city proclamation.

• Our Teen Program, consolidated at Central, has reached out to underserved teens in Berkeley.

• Development of our collection is fully funded and this past year has seen additional initiatives which, for example, purchased sufficient copies of popular materials to reduce queues for holds substantially and beefed up editions of e-books duplicating aspects of the print reference collection to make these widely available at the branches as well as electronically.

Who serves on the Board of Library Trustees

All of the members of Board of Library Trustees are volunteers who live in the Berkeley community. We devote dozens of hours per month to our work on behalf of the library. Our monthly meetings, on the third Wednesday of each month, are open to the public and many community members have taken advantage of the public comment session to address BOLT on a range of issues. We do listen to the concerns expressed in these sessions, as well as the correspondence received at the library. It is our responsibility to weigh the various views and to establish sound policy and management of the library.

It should not surprise anyone reading this that our community has a wealth of committed citizens expressing a variety of views on almost any issue. They are vocal and active in the public debate. It is what many of us cherish about living in Berkeley. In a representative democracy, however, decision-making is left to a smaller group to master the details of proposed actions and institute those that are appropriate. BOLT knows that we cannot please everyone all the time but we do want the community to understand that we listen carefully and, at all times, strive to use our best judgment in implementing policy.

Four years ago, thanks to the generosity of the Berkeley community, the beautifully renovated Central Library opened its doors to great celebration. The local and national press praised the project and library workers were justifiably proud of our involvement.

To enter the Central Library and its four branches today is to enter an altered and much-diminished facility. In this once world class and prestigious organization, service has deteriorated and library staff has no confidence that it is safe to speak openly about problems.

What has the community lost?

Hours of operations have been reduced by 20 percent. Remember when every branch was open until 9 p.m. on weekdays? No more.

Once library users found books and CDs quickly reshelved and available for checkout. No more.

Now library materials are frequently unavailable because of shelving backlogs created by a reduced workforce. Library users are regularly advised that the books they need won’t be available for several days, and carts of unshelved DVDs languish in work areas.

Library employees once felt respected in their workplace. No more. Now staff morale is at an all-time low.

Until two years ago, 30 part-time library aides were assigned to shelve at the Central Library. Now there are only 18 aides to do the work.

Three librarians were assigned to each branch. Now there are only two.

The Reference Department was nationally known for its skillful handling of inquiries. Alas, no more. The Reference Department has lost four positions in the past two years and now relies on substitutes and library school interns much of the time.

Vivian Pisano, the recently hired deputy director, quit after just three months on the job, striking another blow to staff hopes for restoring the library to its former levels.

Several other highly valued managers have resigned or retired early in the past few years as well. Once Berkeley library was led by a respectful and dedicated group of leaders willing to consult and compromise. Alas, no more.

A system of radio frequency tags (RFID) was implemented by library management, supposedly to reduce repetitive stress injuries among staff, and therefore saving the library money. However, the truth is repetitive stress injuries were actually reduced prior to the RFID program. Ironically, repetitive stress injuries have increased due to the RFID program.

SEIU Local 535, the union for city workers including most library staff, is proud of our efforts to use proper channels to advocate for the public and to protect our members. A facilitated Organizational Diagnosis last year (costing the library $50,000) found that the library organization was in crisis and that management and the director were responsible for handling changes poorly. Remedies were implied, but have been neglected.

In November 2005, City Council stepped in and mandated that a labor/management committee be formed to create a meaningful dialog between all concerned parties. Library union members participated with the understanding that retaliatory actions against outspoken workers would cease. Unfortunately, the retaliations have continued and SEIU 535 was forced to discontinue meeting until management gives assurance that workers who speak up will be protected from unfair treatment in the workplace. Staff frustration grew to the point that last month a majority of library workers signed a petition of no confidence in Library Director Jackie Griffin.

There is a crisis in leadership at Berkeley Public Library. It is being discussed in the local and national press. This is not the public library the citizens of Berkeley deserve. However, SEIU 535 is ready to sit at the table and seek agreements with Library management. For starters, let’s agree on fair and respectful ways to lead and guide employees. Then let’s talk about the work we all want to do and how to do it best.

The so called “problem” with illegal immigration from southern countries, Mexico the source of most pressure, is so much larger than that Mexican workers make less and are under employed and want jobs and better pay in the United States. Sure, the simple minded among us clamor for unworkable punitive measures, police state enforcement and punishment, and solid walls at the borders. This is not merely a border state issue or their responsibility to resolve. The news article, “Cheaper China taking business away from Mexico” (San Francisco Chronicle, April 2006), tells of the larger picture from the view of Mexican workers and factory operators in relation to Chinese competition.

When we start to connect the dots of cheap Mexican and Chinese worker’s and the dots of “cheap” this and cheap that, “cheap” morphs into greed on a convoluted international scale that again fine tunes to include immorality on a colossal universal and spiritual scale. What would Jesus say?

The honest secular reply may be that as long as people can buy goods cheaper, and the retailers can buy it cheaper, and the manufacturers can hire cheaper workers, they will do so. No one appears to care about the poor overworked underpaid people at the bottom of this pyramid for greed. At the top levels are the investors, materials suppliers, factory owners, and shipping firms. They can do this and make profits entirely because they can do so outside the confines of U.S. laws and the scrutiny of inspectors. Oh, the beauty of outsourcing to third world countries. There are lots of dots to connect that tell the pattern of competitively downward labor prices in this country, Mexico, and China.

But there are more dots to connect. Our businesses want cheap labor; Mexico lacks the capability to manage its industrialization, its abundant work force potentials, and the control of corruption. We in turn pay little attention to their plight except to pass the egregious NAFTA, which further erodes the rural workers incomes. Their option then is to seek the low paying ($2.59 an hour), foreign financed (mostly U.S.), “maquiladoras” and the abusive harsh working conditions. That is one big dot.

The displaced workers know that over the border in America are better jobs, higher pay, and un-known to them, the greedy American employers always seeking more profit at less cost, and the greedy and needy American people eager for “bargains.” Connect several more dots.

Now add in the China dot that represents worse conditions by which foreign investors and retail goods corporations are flooding China to under cut what has been done in Mexico (and other poor countries) to capture the low paid Chinese work force ($1 an hour and less). Now the ”scourge” of evading Mexican immigrants is upon us and our officials are beset with conflicting values, goals, defenses, and options, and excuses and cannot seem to connect the dots. The Chronicle article “Cheaper China taking business away from Mexico,” is trying to tell us how to connect the dots. And when that is done we will see the larger social-economic-international matrix that implicates us all—no place to hide.

We the greedy consumer aid and abet China’s under cutting of Mexico’s “maquiladoras” and our own workers as well. This is an international morality play, by which we American consumers choose to look the other way, as in Darfur and other past genocide hotspots, and blithely overlook the corrupt, dictatorial, indifferent, cruel, etc. actions of the Chinese Communist government, and the “problems” in Mexico and our own backyard. A secular Jesus would merely say, something like, “Look at the last five of the Ten Commandments and find your own way to compassion and morality.” This would not be inserting religion into this issue, but merely quoting one of the worlds greatest teachers on how to behave.

So, to all of you, go do your job of leading.

Ken Norwood is a retired architect and planner as well as an author, speaker and community organizer.

I am the child of immigrants who came to the United States in 1910, at the height of the great European immigration. During World War II, my mother aided illegal Jewish immigrants who were escaping Hitler’s Germany. I as a child remember these traumatized people who were smuggled over the border from Mexico. One six-foot-tall woman was curled up in half a gas tank to get across the border, while others described their experiences under the Nazis--sterilization, and I saw the fingers with pulled out finger nails. These Jewish refugees in dire need were denied visas to the United States.

Now we have another immigrant crisis, this time created by the right as an election issue. I hear mainly about callousness and greed—punish the poor, preserve a low paid labor force for employers, guard our borders against those seeking to sustain their lives, deny people their language, religious and cultural heritages. and profiteer in developing countries. This is not my religious, moral or patriotic view of what the United States democracy stands for, as

found in its constitution and its history of concern for and broadening of human rights.

Everywhere I go I see immigrants at work. I have a question. How is it that immigrants from Mexico and Latin America with often no more than a sixth grade education, come to the United States and do carpentry, construction work, roofing, plumbing, work as restaurant workers, nannies and domestics and janitors, while our poor (often with high school diplomas) do not have the skills? Are not getting these jobs? An important question we should be asking is how do people from developing countries get these marketable skills and why our own people lack them. And after immigrants are here, how is it that the immigrant family often works together to educate its young, and teaches them to succeed?

Why have we left our own poor and uneducated to punitive and destructive social policies that destroy families and undereducate the young? If a U.S. family or person suffers a misfortune such as unemployment, crime, death or illness, and needs help, our policies make it a punishment—long waits, paperwork barriers, arcane regulations, heartless regulations.

Why are our schools in poor areas underfunded and overcrowded? We should be concentrating our efforts there to improve the lot of the poor and work to have an educated and skilled labor force. I recently visited Venezuela, where new social programs have reduced illiteracy to less than 1 percent. This is better than the illiteracy rate in the United States. They also have free programs offering high school diplomas, job training and university degrees. They have far fewer resources than we have in the United States, but their goals for educating the labor force are clear and implemented.

Here in the United States we are raising college tuition, creating barriers to high school diplomas, and underfunding and overcrowding schools in poor areas. In Venezuela, I heard a man say that in his Caribbean country, they have a gender problem. Boys aged 11 to 21 are dropping out of school and not getting job training and not entering the labor force. That sounds like many poor areas of the United States—East Oakland, Richmond, here in the Bay Area. How are we addressing this issue? We do not even acknowledge it as a gender problem. Are our schools missing the opportunity to educate boys? Recently, a study noted that male enrollment in college was dropping. Maybe we should have another look at gender education in Title IX.

When I go to the symphony and opera, and the theater, the seats are filled with old people. The young often no longer have music, art and theater in the schools. Where will the audiences of the future come from?

We are supposed to have freedom of religion, yet some of our policies are anti-religion. We closed down the Muslim banks serving the U.S. Muslim community because they were supposed to support terrorists—an undefined group that could be anybody. (Muslims do not allow usury in their religion.) Quaker groups, peace groups, religious groups opposing war are infiltrated. What happened to Thou Shalt Not Kill, the good Samaritan, turn the other cheek, charity to the poor, not coveting thy neighbors goods (oil), and so on? If we really wanted to solve our immigration problem, especially for immigrants from Latin America, we would be implementing policies that work to develop the economies of our neighbors to the south. The World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund and our foreign policies would be designed to improve the educational level of the labor forces in developing countries, increasing access to health care and improving public health, funding loans to local entrepreneurs, improving agricultural productivity, working on environmental and labor issues, and helping to make life in Mexico and Latin America economically viable for the people who live there.

Instead, our policies only view developing countries and immigrants through greedy corporate eyes. They are the source of a cheap labor force, a potential market for arms, pesticides, herbicides, a resource for producing cheap goods, a cheap resource exploiting lumber and pharmaceutical plants. Our policies support the privatization of water, health care, education, prisons, transportation, ravaging the environment and everything that can be perceived at profit producing. These policies must change, and we can only do that by changing the leadership of our country.

Closing our borders and ousting immigrants is not the answer. We need to look at the big picture. What are we saying about our country, our values, what are we doing to our planet? What is the constitutional, moral, humane way to treat human beings? Our religious, cultural, and legal background gives us guidelines, let’s follow them.

Columns

Anyone who thinks the Bush administration is too far down in the polls to even contemplate attacking Iran should consider the following developments:

First, the reason British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was dumped was not because of a “cabinet shuffle” following the recent shellacking the Labor Party took in local elections. The real reason was that Washington demanded his head following a statement by Straw that an attack on Iran “was not on the agenda,” would be a violation of international law, and that any talk of using nuclear weapons against Teheran was “nuts.”

According to David Clark, special advisor to former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, Prime Minister Tony Blair sacked Cook back in 2001 because Washington thought he was wishy washy on using military force. Writing in the Guardian, Cook argues that Straw’s lack of enthusiasm for a military solution to the Iran crisis doomed him. “It wouldn’t be the first time the Bush Administration played an important role in persuading Tony Blair to sack his foreign minister,” writes Clark.

The new Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, voted against the Iraq war, but her nickname—The Great Survivor—suggests that she will do whatever Blair wants her to. And according to Ewan MacAskill of the Guardian, Tony is actually more hawkish on Iran than Bush.

Second, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s recent broadside at Russia over using gas and oil as “tools of intimidation and blackmail,” and for the Kremlin’s anti-democratic turn, seemed almost designed to torpedo any United States-Russian cooperation in the U.N. Security Council on Iran.

While some of Cheney’s attack was aimed at trying to undermine Russian and Chinese interests in Central Asian oil by re-routing Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan hydrocarbons through Turkey, the tone was reminiscent of the 1950s. Indeed, the Moscow press called it a “new Cold War,” and one paper even compared it to Winston Churchill’s 1946 Fulton, Missouri speech that launched the last one.

The White House is unhappy about the recent $100 billion gas deal between Iran and China and is fearful that, in the scramble for Central Asian oil, Washington is losing out. Last month Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia were asked the join the Shanghai Cooperation Group, an intergovernmental formation launched back in 2001 by Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manuchehr Mohammadi said that the Group would “make the world more fair,” and allow Russia and Iran to build a “gas and oil arc” and coordinate their activities.

All of which argues that the White House doesn’t think there is a snowball’s chance in the Kara Kum desert that China and Russia will vote to declare Iran in violation of Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which would declare Iran a threat to international peace and security, and almost guarantee a war by September.

So why would the administration turn its designated berserker loose at this delicate time? To launch a new Cold War on Russia and China, sideline the UN and, damn the torpedoes, on to Teheran.

Third was Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s coup against the CIA. All intelligence will now be controlled by the military, the same people that cooked the information that launched the war on Iraq.

Fourth: Reza Pahlavi, son of the former Shah, is organizing a “front” of Iranian ex-patriots to overthrow the present regime in Teheran.

And fifth, The Herald (Scotland) reported May 16 that the Pentagon is ramping up two plans for bombing Iran.

Plan No. 2 calls for “demonstration” bombing raids on the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz and the hexafluoride plant at Isfahan.

No one is talking about sending in ground troops. Not even the White House is that crazy.

Former Army intelligence analyst William Arkin, the man who first blew the whistle on the possible use of nuclear weapons on Iran, recently commented in the Washington Post, “The United States military is really, really getting ready, building war plans and options, studying maps, shifting its thinking.”

So the pieces are in place: a complacent ally, a provocative VP, the military in charge, a plan, and Ahmed Chalabi—sorry, Reza Pahlavi—ready to gather in the rose petals.

If the Nepalese parliament ever gets around to examining the role played by other nations in fueling the civil war that has claimed some 13,000 lives over the past decade, there are going to be some red faces in Washington, London and New Delhi.

The British gave combat helicopters to the Royal Nepal Army, and India supplied FN submachine guns and advisors. The United States, however, bears most of the blame for not only encouraging the Nepalese monarchy to seek a military victory over the Communist party of Nepal-Maoist (CPNM), but also providing over 8,000 M-16 assault rifles, night fighting equipment, and military advisors.

Former U.S. Ambassador, Michael R. Malinowski—an old Pakistan and Afghanistan hand—compared CPNM leader Baburam Bhattarai to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and said that the insurgents “literally have to be bent back to the table.” King Gyanendra took that advice, dissolved parliament and went on the offensive. The outcome was predictable: a massive jump in deaths and disappearances and the eventual collapse of the throne’s attempt to rule by decree and “win” the civil war.

For the time being, Parliament is back in charge, but the Royal Nepal Army is 72,000 strong and, thanks to the United States, British, and Indians, very well armed. The situation is still extremely dangerous.

The United States will also have some answering to do in Somalia, where it is backing a coalition of warlords who call themselves the “Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter Terrorism.” Add those two last words to your title and the U.S. turns on the money spigot.

The Bush Administration is mum on the charge, but the government of President Abdullahi Yusuf has been quite forthright.

“The U.S. funded the warlords in the recent battle in Mogadishu, there is not doubt about that,” Somali government spokesman Abdirahman Dinari told Reuters May 4. “The warlords, though U.S. support, have caused so many deaths of innocent civilians … it only fuels civil war.”

Washington has long had its eye on Somalia because of its proximity to the Gulf of Aden, gateway to the Red Sea. The United States presently has 1,600 troops north of Somalia in Djibouti, and has scattered bases and Special Forces all across North Africa, supposedly because the region is rife with terrorists. With the possible exception of Morocco and Southern Algeria, there is no evidence for this.

The ostensible reason for backing the Somalian warlords is a rumored al Qaeda presence. But even a Pentagon study found no sign of the group (which is, in any case, more a point of view than an organization). It is no coincidence that “terrorism” always seems to crop up in places that have lots of oil and gas, or happen to be located in critical choke points like the Gulf of Aden.

At least 160 people have been killed in the Mogadishu fighting, the vast majority of them civilians caught in the crossfire.

Transportation—the stepchild of public issues—has suddenly resurfaced as a concern in certain Oakland political circles.

I know, I know. It’s not a glamorous issue, like crime or the schools or downtown development. It’s simply the issue that ties all of the rest of the issues together, and so deserves more attention than we’re giving it.

On Tuesday, county supervisors passed a resolution—introduced by Board of Supervisors President Keith Carson—“supporting equitable financial support of AC Transit by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission for the benefit of its passengers.”

If you walked down the aisle of one of the buses running the 82 line along International and handed that out in a leaflet and asked any of the passengers what it meant, you most certainly would get back mostly blank stares, at best. What it meant, if you had the time to take off work and attend Tuesday morning’s meeting, or if you read about it in Wednesday’s Oakland Tribune, was that supervisors voted 3-1 to chastise the regional transportation commission for putting the lion’s share of its money into BART, while letting AC Transit slowly waste away, even though AC Transit is a transportation lifeline to many county residents.

On the same day as the supervisors meeting, Grand Lake area community activist Caroline Kim raised a similar point in her “Neighborhood News” e-mail newsletter. “The Monday, April 17 Tribune had a glowing article about the BART monorail connector,” Ms. Kim wrote. “Of course, the article had no detailed financial analysis. The project is now expected to cost over $400 million. … The fares from the Coliseum BART Station to the airport are estimated to range from $3.75 to $5.50 per trip. (It’s now $2 on their connector bus.) This cost would be in addition to the fare to the Coliseum Station. They think they will get 13,500 riders a day but they’re not considering a main problem: BART does not serve most of the neighborhoods in Oakland.”

Ms. Kim goes on to note that “the City of Oakland is one of the agencies pushing the development. This month, the council will vote on whether to give BART a $725,000 in-kind contribution for the project.” She concludes by saying “think what $400 million would mean for bus transit for this city—fast service for all the neighborhoods rather than expensive service for those near a BART line.”

If and when it is finished, the BART monorail connector Ms. Kim referred to will provide rail transportation from the Coliseum BART Station to the Oakland International Airport, a trip you can now take on a special connector bus.

Driving Oakland’s streets and highways, or riding on the two major public transit systems available here—AC Transit and BART—it is hard to see how the airport monorail rates $400 million in overall funds ($725,000 coming out of the Oakland budget) over other transportation needs.

Consider this little bit of lunacy.

I live near International Boulevard just south of 73rd Avenue. Once a few months ago, when my car was out of commission, I had to take the bus to attend to some business on a location on MacArthur between 35th Avenue and Fruitvale. To do so, I had to take an International bus to 35th, transfer to a crosstown route, and then transfer again to a MacArthur Avenue bus to get to my destination. It’s all one trip, all in the same direction, and logic would seem to indicate that it would cost one adult fare: $1.75. That’s steep enough in itself, but it isn’t all. AC Transit charges an extra 25 cents to get a transfer. Not a lot, but, then, you don’t get a lot for it, because the transfer is only good for one use. This may have some logic if the rider wants to return the way they came, but not so much when you’re continuing along on the same trip. When I got to 35th and MacArthur, I either had to pay a second full fare to continue on the same trip, with the same bus service, or walk. Figuring that $3.75 was more than one should have to pay to catch a bus within the city, I chose to walk.

Is there any wonder why people abandon AC Transit as soon as they can?

In voting against Supervisor Carson’s resolution calling for more MTC money for AC Transit this week, the Tribune quoted Supervisor Scott Haggerty as telling fellow supervisors to “take the argument to the AC Board. Take this to them and ask them why they’re cutting the routes in the flatlands. Ask them why they’re cutting service on the flatland.”

It is tempting, of course, to blame AC Transit for the AC Transit problems, and many have done so. But AC Transit is charged with balancing its budget, and when that budget is not balanced, it must either make service cuts or introduce fare hikes. In either case, that makes the system less popular, leading to more people abandoning the buses, leading to less money coming into the system, and so to more service cuts and fare hikes—a sort of downward death spiral that will eventually lead to a skeleton public bus service in the East Bay if it is not halted.

One answer might be to make the Metropolitan Transportation Commission an actual transit system, running all of the public transportation within its jurisdiction rather than doling out money to competing systems. In that way, someone could be looking at overall public transit needs in the East Bay, instead of refereeing fights over funds.

A Metropolitan Transportation Commission running both BART and AC Transit might come to the conclusion that in some parts of Oakland, neither system fully serves the public, and some sort of in-between transit line is needed. On International Boulevard between the lake and the San Leandro border, for example, that might mean putting in a light rail line, similar to what is operating so successfully in San Jose. It’s cheaper to build than BART, and has the added bonus that it would serve more people traveling within Oakland, rather than simply passing through to their jobs or a baseball game.

To accomplish that goal, however, East Bay citizens would have to stop seeing public transit expenses as a “subsidy”—something our conservative friends have successfully turned into a bad word—and see it once again as a public service. More than that, a public necessity, as much as police and fire.

The discussion on transportation ought to be going hand-in-hand with the public debate over Oakland’s commercial future.

We’ve said it before in this column: Mayor Jerry Brown and his supporters on the City Council have focused in recent years on rebuilding Oakland’s downtown commercial core. Mr. Brown’s plan was to move 10,000 new residents into the downtown area, in hopes that the department stores would follow. But even if that ever ends up working—and so far, there is no evidence that it will—it would still leave the downtown area as difficult to reach for non-downtown residents as before. 880 seems to be on semi-permanent lockdown mode most days, weekends included, and except for Sundays, the downtown area is not a parking-friendly environment. So even if J.C. Penney’s and Nordstrom’s eventually flock to Mr. Brown’s new downtown, a circumstance that would jam the area’s streets and parking lots even more, how does it benefit most of Oakland’s shoppers?

The same is true for Oakland’s various already-successful neighborhood commercial districts—Lakeshore/Grand, the Fruitvale, College Avenue, the Laurel District, Chinatown, and so forth. These districts could expand—attracting more customers from both Oakland and beyond—but the lack of parking and/or adequate public transportation, along with Oakland’s strangled transportation arteries, blocks them from doing so.

In such a circumstance, why are we spending $400 million—some $725,000 of it projected to be from Oakland—on a monorail between the Coliseum BART Station and the Oakland International Airport instead of putting more money to use on solving more pressing transportation problems?

This is an area in which leadership and community vision are sorely needed and, so far, have been sorely lacking. Another job left undone by the current mayor, to be put on the desk of whoever takes his place.

It’s not at all strange for a bus half-filled with important local officials to roll through the streets of a California city, pointing out tracts and plots and buildings along the way. It is unusual when the other half of the bus is filled with longtime city residents and community activists, and the purpose of the tour is not so much to plot the city’s future as it is to make sure its past is understood.

On Saturday, Richmond’s Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park held its fourth such tour of the city’s World War II era sites, with participants who lived through the era encouraged to add their commentary to the park service’s tour guide.

The result was an exercise in living history.

In one of Richmond’s Latino sections, the bus passed the Mexican Baptist Church near the Atchison Village housing projects, with tour guide Naomi Torres of the National Park Service talking about how the village was once an open field where Mexican-American farmers grazed their livestock and then was built as housing for Kaiser shipyard workers who flocked to Richmond during the war years.

When Torres was finished, Contra Costa Grand Jury Foreman Antonio Medrano, who grew up in Richmond, pointed to the Mexican Baptist Church and said, “I bet you thought all Mexicans were Catholic,” which began his telling of the history of Mexico’s evangelical Protestant movement that later migrated north into the United States.

At the Winters Building off of MacDonald Avenue, which served as both a dance hall and an air raid shelter during the war and which now houses the East Bay Center for The Performing Arts, another Park Ranger asked if anyone on the bus remembered attending any dances there.

“That place was for white folks,” one of the older black participants pointed out. “You have to remember who was welcome and who wasn’t welcome on MacDonald Avenue in those days.” There followed stories of Richmond’s deeply segregated days when young white drivers cruised the city’s main street with impunity but black drivers were cited and arrested by police.

And at a stop along the wharf next to the enormous closed Ford Assembly Plant, some five football fields long, which once housed a tank production factory and is now being prepared for commercial and housing redevelopment by the City of Richmond, one longtime Parchester Village resident recalled how she and her neighbors could see the lights from munitions loading accident explosions on the docks from their windows.

Rosie the Riveter National Park community liaison Betty Reid Soskin, who conceived and designed the tours and works on them jointly with National Park Service Outreach Specialist Naomi Torres, calls them “resoundingly successful,” and says they came out of a desire to “raise the awareness in the City of Richmond that they are in the middle of a national park. There is a misconception that the park is just down by the shoreline but the heart of it is in the Iron Triangle, which is one of the most troubled parts of the city. We’re hoping that the tours can help Richmond form a new identity of itself. We have such a rich history here.”

Soskin says she has resisted suggestions to simply have officials take the tours by themselves, without the longtime residents. “Without the residents telling their stories,” Soskin said, “we’d simply be passing by building sites that we pass by every day, without knowing their historic significance.”

Included on the tours was the Galileo Club on South 23rd Street, where Richmond’s largest single ethnic group before World War II—Italians—had a social club (one of the participants explained that because of Richmond’s sensitive wartime industries, only American citizens could live in the city, and many Italian families were broken up when the elders who were non-citizen immigrants were forced to move out).

Other areas visited were the Pullman District, which includes the still-standing, New Orleans-style hotel where Pullman porters stayed between runs as well as buildings where Pullman passenger cars were repaired and restored; the Park Florist on MacDonald, which was once owned by a Japanese family who were forced to sell the business when they were relocated to an internment camp; and the Kaiser Field Hospital, one of the first structures shipbuilding magnate Henry J. Kaiser used as part of his health care system for his shipyard workers, a system that eventually grew into Kaiser Permanente.

The tours start at the headquarters of the Rosie the Riveter park at Richmond City Hall, where participants view some of the historic memorabilia. Among them are ID badges, ration stamps, welder’s guns, and a welder’s mask used by a Japanese-American welder “until the day he went into an internment camp,” according to park officials.

The photo I.D. badges are especially poignant, giving a human face to an era that is close to us in time, but often forgotten. Housed on a single table in the back of the City Hall complex, the items are being collected for a permanent park museum. While the location for the museum has yet to be determined, park officials say that some of the memorabilia in the park’s projected new Visitors Center at the Ford Assembly Plant.

A park official explained that the park is both a collection of World War II-era historical cites as well as a documentation of activities on what was called “the home front” during the war.

“And we’re using home front in its broadest possible term,” he said. “We’re referring to anything that happened domestically during the war years. Whatever people were doing at that time was affected by the war, or had an effect on the war.”

The official said that while the Rosie the Riveter Park was headquartered in Richmond, the park is a collection of all the west coast wartime history, from Washington State to Southern California.

The fifth and final tour is scheduled for later this summer, but Soskin says the park is seeking more funding to extend the events. The tours have been funded by a grant from PG&E. Slots for the fifth tour are already filled, but at a feedback session following Saturday’s tour, park officials said they were open to suggestions to expand the tours and make them available to more community residents, groups, and officials.

It’s a warm, breezy spring day. I’m sitting in the courtyard at Espresso Roma, lunching on a terrific spinach-mushroom frittata and watching the world of Elmwood pass by. Inside laptops silently hum while lattes are sipped. Though my meter is ticking I’m in no hurry to move. Once here, why would I want to leave?

Berkeley’s Elmwood neighborhood invites lingering and strolling. Stretching along College Avenue from the University to the Oakland border, on gentle terrain past village-like shops and classic architecture, the neighborhood gives you the feeling that of having effortlessly arrived at a long-desired location. On a miniature scale, Elmwood offers something for everyone. A stable neighborhood structure, tree-lined streets, friendly neighborhood shops, global cuisine and cultural venues explain my dilemma, my desire to linger despite a parking meter.

After the Gold Rush and the founding of the University of California, newcomers to Berkeley sought quality homes with proximity to campus and nearby Telegraph Avenue businesses. Aided by Key streetcars along College Avenue, Elmwood Park, named after shade-providing elms, began to expand with both residential and commercial entities. One hundred years later, much of its original small-town charm remains.

The business district of any neighborhood reflects the needs of its populace; the residential areas reflect its heart. Recognizing pride in ownership, I happily strolled along Benvenue and Hillegass Avenues and Russell Street admiring classic brown shingles, craftsman and storybook tutor homes. Even the public library made me pause. Handsome brick and timbers with peaked roof, sunlight filtered through and glancing off ancient leafy elms, benches outside and comfortable seating indoors begged for time spent with a good book.

Admiring architecture doesn’t require a degree in styles or movements. You don’t need to know what it is to know what you like. Two- and three-story brown shingles trimmed in forest-green, gentian-blue or brick-red with limpet like purple wisteria coating one side; a broad front porch with Adirondack chairs awaiting your repose or a bedroom balcony for that first cup of morning coffee. A pale-green Queen Anne with small multi-paned windows, another stately home fronted by massive white columns. Gardens to drool over: flower-filled with roses and rhododendrons, framed by years-old pines, palms and oaks, alive with birdsong. Homes to treasure.

Elmwood’s business district radiates from a hub at College and Ashby, limited in size but limitless in choices. There’s something for every taste. Start with food. In the mood for something Eastern? You can sample the tastes of Pakistan and India at Naan ’N’ Curry or enter the cool, elegant rooms of King Yen, where large open windows shaded beneath eggplant awnings beckon you in for a gracious meal. When you’re in a hurry, pop into Manpuku and grab a delicious assortment of pre-packed combination sushi. Study the illustrated menu to get a preview of their bento and ramen offerings.

Red wine, olive oil and al dente pasta call up the tastes of Italy. Trattoria La Siciliana announces Bon Appetito along with a special board listing offerings of antipasti, primi and secondi dishes. Inside the ocher-washed walls and tiled floors and tables invoke the spirit of a secret Italian café. Stop at A.G. Ferrari Foods to bring Italy home. Tapenade di olive and asiago fresco before ravioli con spinaci e ricotta under ragu alla Bolognese washed down with Belvedere Umbria—worthy of a meal from the finest Italian villa!

Gordo’s Taqueria and La Cascada Taqueria can satisfy your taste for over the border while the Holy Land Restaurant offers kosher and vegetarian choices. La Mediterranée’s sidewalk tables waft the aromas of hummus and baba ghanous. Cold cucumber soup or warm filled fillos, the wonderful blend of spices will entice you in.

All that food made me feel sluggish, ready to work it all off. Bolfing’s Elmwood Hardware has supplies for whatever project you’ve been putting off, like putting up a Shaker peg rack, perusing the decorator’s palette for just the right shade of goldenrod or picking up a new LED flashlight for your earthquake supplies.

Thinking about your garden, or lack of one? Inside Mrs. Dalloway’s I was inspired to landscape and plant. Yellow Gloveables, fine Felco clippers and Renee’s Garden seeds could get me started. A lovely space, as airy and fresh as a spring garden, displaying a wonderful assortment of books, potted plants, garden-related accoutrements and a red wicker chair made it hard for me to leave.

Indulgence is easy along College Avenue. Jeremy’s discounted prices allow shopping without guilt. I spotted flowered sequined skirts, light-as-air sundresses and a striped cream sweater that mimicked a tropical spree. The turquoise and silver jewelry at Bill’s Trading Post would be the perfect accent. And who wouldn’t covet a finely crafted Pomo feather basket or an obsidian dream catcher?

Far Leaves satisfies the taste for tea in an attractive, peaceful setting. Patrons are encouraged to try new blends and brew their choice of black, oolong, green, herbal infusion or rare tea in-house for optimum enjoyment. Take home a lovely ceramic tea set to prolong the pleasure.

Cultural venues are easy walking distance from Elmwood’s hub. The Elmwood Theater is a Berkeley landmark, surviving since 1914 and saved by the Friends of the Theater in 1994. Touted as a family theater in its prime, today’s offerings cater to a broader family but better reflect the interests of the community.

A National Historic Landmark, the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts is reminiscent of a rustic National Park lodge. Dark brown exposed framing with redwood rafters and small wall lamps set the scene for theater, dance and music performances, Lego and Mad Science summer camps and classes for all ages.

Meter satisfied, I ambled back to my sidewalk perch for another cappuccino and just a while longer in the village of Elmwood. Embodying the sense of having attained Berkeley-style achievement, Elmwood may be small in size but its essence looms large.

Photograph by Marta Yamamoto

Choices for excellent international cuisine are close at hand along College Avenue in the Elmwood District.

In the 1880s and ‘90s, few East Bay architects were as fashionable as Alfred Washington Pattiani (1855–1935). Italian name notwithstanding, Pattiani, who was born in Chillicothe, Ohio, was descended from a well-to-do German family. His paternal grandfather, Alois Fahrnbacher of Landshut, Bavaria, was a tobacco manufacturer, commercial court assessor, and a member of the Bavarian parliament.

His mother, Elisabeth von Bergen, came from the Baltic port city of Stettin and studied music—perhaps in Weimar, for she is said to have been a student of Franz Liszt, who taught piano there beginning in 1848. Possibly also in Weimar, Elisabeth met Christian Alfred Fahrnbacher.

Like many German students of their generation, the two were apparently involved in the 1848 revolution. They ended up marrying and fleeing to the United States, where they changed their name to Pattiani.

She became a published composer under the name Eliza Pattiani or simply Madame Pattiani and is known for marches she composed for Northwestern University and the California State Normal School (now San Jose State University). Her husband was a daguerreotype photographer in Cincinnati and Chicago.

In 1870, after having lived in St. Louis, Chicago, and Evanston, Ill., the family moved to San Jose for health reasons. Son Alfred began his architectural apprenticeship at age 15 while completing his schooling at the Business College of San Jose.

For two years he studied architecture under Theodore Lenzen, San Jose’s preeminent architect. When his father died in 1873, Alfred began working as a draftsman for various Bay Area architects. In 1879, he built himself a house in Alameda, where he established a building firm in 1882.

Billing himself as Real Estate Broker and Builder, Pattiani catered to the affluent class, designing and building hundreds of residences in Alameda, Oakland, and Berkeley. His styles included Stick-Eastlake, Queen Anne, Shingle, and Colonial Revival. Although a number of his Berkeley houses are extant—including a row of six cottages on the 2100 block of Ward St. and two elegant Queen Annes at Blake and Fulton—many that were built near the UC campus fell victim to university expansion. In 1973, the razing of a Pattiani house on a prominent corner in Alameda was the impetus that led to the passage of Proposition A, which saved much of that city’s Victorian residential character.

In 1889, Pattiani built his 185th house on the southwest corner of Ward and Fulton streets. This large Queen Anne sported a generous polygonal turret crowned by a bell-shaped cupola and displayed a full complement of gingerbread ornamentation. The client who paid $3,500 for the house was San Francisco wine merchant Samuel B. Stanley. Unaccountably, Stanley preferred the charms of San Jose to those of Berkeley. In February 1891, he sold the house and two additional lots to the Sadler family.

Caleb and Lydia Sadler were English immigrants who owned a San Francisco fancy goods and notions business. Their second son, Frank E. Sadler, would eventually own the Sadler’s store at Shattuck Avenue and Center Street, selling books, stationery, photographic supplies, and sporting goods. Sadler’s also carried a distinctive line of picture postcards, always displaying the photo in an oval vignette.

The Sadlers spent only a few years in the house. In 1894, they sold it to Mary E. and Charles E. Finney and moved to the Northside. A mechanical engineer, Finney was an enterprising man. In 1899 he built three houses directly to the south of his house. These were announced as the first in the area to contain indoor plumbing. Ten years later, Finney moved his house, which had sat in the center of a triple lot at 2154 Ward Street, to the northeast corner of the lot, changing the address to 2156 Ward St.

Shortly thereafter, Finney expanded his house to the rear and converted it to two flats. He also built a second house next door at 2154 Ward St. During World War II, a subsequent owner of 2156 Ward subdivided the second-floor flat into two apartments and added a fourth unit in the enlarged third floor. With every successive remodel, the roofline was altered, rooms assumed new functions, and kitchens and bathrooms sprouted in any available space.

In 1979, Stephen Johnson bought the house as income property. Five years later, he and Erna Andre decided to make it their home. The first floor still retained many original features, including the twin parlor fireplaces, ceiling rosettes, moldings and wainscoting. However, there was little clue as to many rooms’ original function.

The couple sought guidance from their neighbor, architect Ron Bogley, with whom they visited several Pattiani houses in Alameda. Anthony Bruce of BAHA introduced them to Pattiani expert Paul Roberts, who explained how the rooms would have been laid out by the architect (Pattiani usually arranged the front and back parlors along one side of the hallway, with the dining room on the other side toward the rear).

In 1985, after exhaustive research in several libraries, Bogley prepared drawings representing the house’s external elevations and floor plans as they would have been in 1889, 1910, and 1946, as well as a set of working drawings. During this first phase of the restoration, the Johnsons reclaimed the original bedrooms and bathroom out of the front second-floor apartment. Wood moldings were hand-stripped. Period brass hardware and antique light fixtures were installed. Bradbury & Bradbury Victorian wallpapers were put up. When authentic items weren’t to be found, replicas were made to order, as was the case with the master-bedroom doors, second-floor ceiling rosettes, and twenty corner blocks for the door frames.

In 1994, the front steps were rebuilt, receiving new railings and newel posts. A few years later, the Johnsons reinstated the house as a single-family home by creating an internal stairwell in the 1910 rear addition. They relocated the dining room from the back parlor to its original space across the hall, remodeled the kitchen, and created a large “antique” bathroom in the second-floor space previously occupied by the rear apartment’s kitchen.

Four years ago, it was time to attack the exterior, which not only looked haphazard but was seriously dilapidated. Contractor Christopher Osborn re-established cohesiveness, shingling the second- and third stories to set them apart from the channel rustic siding on the ground floor. The turret finial was taken down and repaired, and the turret was clad with scalloped copper shingles. The octagonal porthole in the turret’s dome illuminates a most unusual vaulted space that currently serves as an aerie bed chamber.

In the final phase, begun last year, the Johnsons renovated the first-floor rooms and interior staircase. Newel post replicas were made to replace the missing original ones, the wainscoting was taken down, cleaned, and reassembled, and the parlors and hallway were painted.

In 2004, the house was featured in BAHA’s “Berkeley 1890” house tour, and this week it was one of only two houses to receive BAHA’s preservation award for both exterior and interior restoration.

For homeowners who are contemplating historic restoration, Steve Johnson has some words of advice: “The original builder did it his way for a reason—try to understand it before you change things. Do the work to last; don’t take shortcuts, or you’ll be redoing it in a few years. Lastly, there is no financial reward for this kind of restoration. Your reward will come from the joy of living in a grand old house.”

The writer is indebted to Paul Roberts for information on A.W. Pattiani’s life.

A friend of mine has a bassist living upstairs who is still working out the chords to In a Gadda Da Vida after living there for about 12 years. My friend is a patient person but she’s begun to exhibit something of a tick and often looks dolefully into space for long periods of time, returning from her reverie only when the music has stopped for some short spell.

I don’t thing that’s she’s given to thoughts of homicide normally but she’s recently begun asking a lot of unwholesome questions about firearms and those CIA poisoning tricks they used to talk about in the sixties (probably while “In a Gadda Da Vida” was playing in the background).

I have begun to suggest that she might want to try some sound control techniques in the building before moving on to anything more rash. She has agreed and we’ll see how things work out. These problems can be complex and changes in buildings which are designed to reduce sound can be expensive, but if that cute little freckly kid from next door has grown into a 17-year-old drummer in a band called Trama, you might also benefit from some of these notions. So here goes.

If your problem is between the floors of a building, one of the best techniques is to use what is called Resilient Channel (sometimes called sound channel). This requires replacement of the sheetrock ceilings or the addition of another layer to the ceiling. If you have plenty of ceiling height, it’s fine to leave the first layer of sheetrock, although testing by National Research Council Canada suggests that this is not a good technique. First let me explain resilient channel.

This is a Z-shaped piece of metal that comes in 10’ lengths and is screwed onto the bare rafters of a ceiling before sheetrock is applied. The channel is run perpendicular to the floor joists so that it runs across the bottom edge of many joists. Once you’ve run them every 16” from one wall to the other, you hang your sheetrock ceiling to the channel, not to the joists. The shape of the channel is such that the sheetrock has a bit of bounce to it and rather than being firmly mounted to the floor above it sort of hangs and is, therefore, much less able to transmit sound through the floor.

The resilient metal allows the sound to get lost between the floor framing and the sheetrock.

You can also add some other things to this methodology if you like:

• You can insulate the space between the joists, in the floor thickness using common insulation. You can also install Sound Board, which is essentially a fibrous cellulose matting that’s 1/2” thick.

• You can also install this material across the bottom of the joists prior to installing the Rezi-channel but remember that you’ll need longer screws. It’s a good idea to use 5/8” sheetrock on the ceiling if you want to really kill those bad vibes.

For the really serious isolationist, cement tile-backer can be used as a part of such an assembly, although this is probably better for high frequencies than for low ones. You’ll want to remember to bring the launch codes with you when you lock down for the night.

For walls between living spaces you can use sound channel and insulation or additional layers of sheetrock but the best method in my opinion involves building one of two types of party walls:

My favorite works like this and you’ll actually be rebuilding the wall between the two spaces (unless this is a new project): You build a wall with two sets of studs (upright 2x4’s) on a 2x6 bottom and top member. One set of 2x4’s is built to one edge of the 2x6 facing one room. The other set is built to the other edge facing the other room.

They sort of stagger across the length of the wall. Each 2x4 occupies most of the wall space but none of them touch the sheetrock of both sides. Each one touches and attaches to just one. So when you hit the wall on one side (or strike a power chord), one set of 2x4’s will vibrate but none of the other 2x4’s or the other layer of sheetrock will.

I used this technique in a duplex in Richmond many years ago and when we were done, we could holler on one side and hear virtually nothing on the other. Great for marital disputes or privacy during intimate moments.

The second type of party wall is simply a second wall built almost against the first with one or two layers of sheetrock in between. This eats up another few inches of room space and seems less efficient than the staggered technique. Nonetheless, it is simple and can be added to an existing wall.

I should also mention that carpeting with thick padding is a great sound absorber and requires no significant alteration to the building.

For sounds next door (like Trama’s weekly band practice), there’s nothing quite like double-glazed windows. It’s impressive how well these advents of modern building science perform at sound inhibition. About 12 year ago, I was inspecting a small house built right beside the 580 freeway.

It was up a small hill so that you looked right over onto the freeway and the hill acted like an amphitheater capturing and funneling the sound right toward the house. Outside, for our best efforts, we could not converse but when we walked into the house, recently fitted with these new-fangled windows, the sound was little more than a distant hum. It was striking.

This works equally well for neighbors that fight, dogs that bark all night or whatever drives you to and beyond distraction. If you work nights and sleep days, it might just keep you sane.

I’ll add one last measure for the band members. If you live at Mom’s house or the police have now been at your house more than 4 times, you might try the following technique.

Drum kits can be placed on a floating floor or in a hanging room. You can build a floor that sits above the primary floor in the room and either place it on isolation bumpers or hung from the ceiling. bumpers can be found at Granger’s (or another industrial supply house).

I suggested these bumpers when my osteopath-friend Catherine was being assaulted by the vibration created by a restaurant ventilation system in her building. They can be used on motors or anything that creates vibration or noise. You can also hang a floor from the ceiling by use of cables or threaded rod.

The secondary floor need only hang a fraction of an inch above the floor to prevent transmission of the vibration from a drum kit. The hangers (rods or cables) can employ isolation devices like the one mentioned above where they connect to the ceiling above.

If you build a room instead of just a floor and hang it from above, you can really isolate the sound. There are certainly more techniques and high tech materials one can buy if you want to take this further but hopefully, this will get you started on the road to serenity.

So if the person you’re sharing the duplex with starts a Herman’s Hermits cover band, don’t get mad, don’t get even, just get resilient.

Got a question about home repairs and inspections? Send them to Matt Cantor, in care of East Bay Real Estate, at realestate@berkeleydailyplanet.com.

I rarely venture into my garden with constructive intent but without my Felco pruners and my hori-hori. Most of the time those hand tools are enough because I have a very small garden. Sometimes, though, I need to do something that requires two hands and a bigger tool, and I have my favorites among those too.

You know how the favorite recipes get spotted with flying sauces? Sometimes you can tell which are a gardener’s favorite tools, because they bear a similar patina; they’re polished by soil and the chrism of skin oils. I think it increases their value.

I actually spent $50 on a spade—some years back, when $50 was an even more significant investment than now. I’d looked at several trenching spades, but Smith & Hawken’s “poacher’s spade” won my heart when I picked it up.

I did postpone my gratification until after S&H changed its always overheated catalogue prose about the item; it just bugged me too much to read about the poacher sneaking around the estate, “dog at bay,” until he found a rabbit, cut its warren with the spade, and let the dog catch it. A dog at bay is anything but quiet.

Fortunately the spade is better then the copy. It’s a D-handled tool, which I generally dislike, but it works well in our heavy clay. The blade is long and narrow and fixed well onto its handle. It has enough footspace to use one’s whole weight on, and the leverage to make it count.

My other, longer-handled spade is a “lady shovel,” or “flower shovel.” I’m not that ladylike but I do know the advantage of a small-bladed spade in that clay, and of making two small loads to lift instead of one big one.

I recommend lady shovels for anyone who is older than 20 and/or smaller than a linebacker, for gardening here.

If I were really ambitious, I’d use a bastard file to sharpen the blade ends of both spades. This is kinder to the plants whose roots I bother when I dig, and indispensable for root-pruning plants to keep their spread in bounds.

The other tool-maintenance secret I learned in school (Remember, I’m someone who had to go to post-grad classes to learn “lefty loosey, righty tighty.”) is the Bucket of Oily Sand.

This is what it sounds like: a sound bucket, wide enough for the business ends of every soil-contact tool you have, filled with sand over which you’ve poured oil. What kind of oil? Something nonflammable, please, and nontoxic or inert.

If you remember to wipe it off after use, motor oil is OK. Keep it where you store your tools.

When you finish digging, take your mud-encrusted tool, scrape off the worst, and pump the blade up and down in the bucket, a la butter churn. Cleans, polishes, and protects against moisture all in seconds.

For more specialized tasks I have some more esoteric tools, and next week I’ll tell you where to look for the niftiest.

I read in the paper a review of a new book entitled My Mother’s Wedding Dress: The Life and Afterlife of Clothes. Justine Picardie, former features editor of British Vogue, has penned a memoir on “how clothes express our personality and style, and also provide a view of how we live and what has passed.”

Damn. I should write that book. It could be a bestseller.

I’d start my version of Picardie’s story in 1955 with the leopard print pedal pushers my mother dressed me in when I was 3 years old. I’d move forward in time to the Gene Autry cowboy boots I insisted on wearing at 4, and the yellow fairy godmother gown I wore to kindergarten on Halloween.

From there I’d skip ahead a few years to the blue jumper, Peter Pan-collared blouse, white socks and saddle shoes I donned for the first day of junior high school in 1964. What a mistake. After that I wore only black socks and Converse sneakers on my feet, and later sheer black stockings held up by a painfully tight pink garter belt. I employed clear nail polish to keep the runs that started at my ankles from traveling up my calves and thighs. It never worked.

Around the time the White Album came out I was sporting mini-skirts with matching poorboy sweaters. I was particularly fond of an ensemble that included an impossibly short ultra-suede green skirt, pink and green striped top, pink stockings and green Mary Janes. I was a vision of coordinated loveliness. John, Paul, George and Ringo would not be able to resist me should they ever have had an opportunity to grace my presence.

On to the proms: turquoise when I was a freshman, violet as a sophomore, lime green junior year, and a homemade purple, orange and red psychedelic polyester number with a matching fringed shawl for the big senior dance. I thought my date, Jackie Wiler, had puked on his powder-blue ruffled tuxedo shirt because of something he had ingested earlier in the evening, but maybe it was my dress, and the Jungle Gardenia perfume emanating from every pore of my body that made him sick to his stomach and unable to dance with me.

In college I went organic: overalls and plaid flannel shirts, moccasins or knee-high lace-up black leather boots. The bigger I got, the baggier the clothes. For dress-up, which was rare since I didn’t get invited anywhere, I wore the same paisley print, princess-style Indian dress that substituted for pajamas on dateless nights. I accessorized my tie-dye T-shirts and patched hip hugger bellbottoms with a variety of necklaces made from beads, bones, seeds, and shark teeth.

I was particularly fond of a pair of Asian sandals that wrapped around my big toes and produced a rash that itched like hell and refused to go away. I replaced the sandals with uncomfortable wooden Doctor Scholls or a pair of neon orange platform shoes that caused me to pitch dangerously forward whenever I strapped them onto my feet.

I wore a two-piece purple polyester thingy to see Simon and Garfunkel, a flowered vest with matching pants to see Jimi Hendrix, and a Mexican peasant blouse and barely legal cut-offs to a Janis Joplin concert. Then I graduated from college. Everything I’ve worn since is a blur. Maybe it’s just as well. I don’t think I have enough material for a memoir based around my wardrobe history.

As I sit here in my raggedy-ass bathrobe and fuzzy pink bedroom slippers, I decide to try another angle. Local writer Daniel Handler has just published a book in which every chapter starts with a single adverb. Perhaps I could combine the two concepts: Picardie’s clothes memoir with Handler’s parts-of-speech chapter headings. I could call it Dressed Extremely Poorly, My Life in Ugly, Badly Chosen Clothes. It would be full of descriptive language summarizing the inappropriate garments that have filled my closets.

But I wouldn’t include those long ago well-worn leopard print pedal pushers. They were, without a doubt, timeless, and really, really cool.

In September 1999, then-Texas Gov. George Bush told an audience during the New Hampshire presidential primary, “English-only would mean to people, ‘Me, not you.’” The few times during his White House tenure Bush has seen moves to restrict the use of non-English languages by government agencies, the president didn’t budge from that position.

However, when House and Senate Republicans pounded Bush recently for championing a non-punitive immigration reform measure he slightly backpedaled, supporting the Senate’s tough English-only amendment and a competing amendment that simply touts English. The Senate’s English-only amendments are at best empty symbolism, and at worst, a xenophobic, race-tinged tact that could imperil programs that genuinely help non-English students and adults attain English proficiency.

Bush knows that. As Texas governor, he enthusiastically backed bilingual education, and for a good reason. It is the quickest path for non-English speaking immigrants to assimilate and ultimately attain citizenship.

If Congress’ English-only amendment stands, it would undermine that effort. But it wouldn’t be the first time that a shortsighted Congress shot itself in the foot on the issue. In 1996, the House passed an English-only bill. The following year, Arizona Sen. John McCain proposed a “non-binding” Senate resolution endorsing English plus. The House has proposed amendments and even legislation over the years to dump or severely curtail funding for bilingual education.

The English-only drive got a rocket boost in 1998 when businessman Ron Unz dumped millions into the campaign to pass Proposition 227 in California. The initiative’s premise was simple: bilingual education was costly, wasteful and ineffectual, and non-English speaking students, mainly Hispanics, didn’t learn a lick of English in bilingual classes. Some charged that the programs were a sneaky way to promote multiculturalism.

The proposition drastically slashed funding for bilingual education programs. English-only proponents boasted that students would learn English in a year or less if they simply spoke it. The proposition passed by a landslide. English-only quickly became the national rage.

In the next few years, English-only groups soon popped up in dozens of states. They subtly played on the public fear that hordes of mostly poor, non-white, foreign-born immigrants were out to subvert English-speaking values and civilization. Voters and state legislators in 27 states bought the English-only pitch, and enacted statues that specified English as the official language.

But four years after Proposition 227 ignited the English-only firestorm, educators took a closer look at the proposition to see if it magically transformed non-English speaking students into proficient English speakers. They used language census figures from the California Department of Education. The results were dismal. Less than half of non-English speaking students enrolled in English immersion programs had attained proficiency in English.

There was no tangible evidence that English immersion programs improved English skills of students faster or more effectively than students in bilingual education courses. Many parents demanded waivers to enroll their children in bilingual programs. By 2003, more than 100,000 students in California were taking bilingual classes.

Meanwhile, nearly a half-million limited English speaking students were not “mainstreamed” into English programs. That meant they received no special help in learning English, and consequently their English language skills remained poor to non-existent.

The failure of the English only approach to deliver a new generation of flawless English-speaking students was no surprise. A decade earlier, a federal study to determine whether bilingual education helped or hindered the attainment of English proficiency concluded that bilingual education was not the losing proposition that English-only advocates claimed.

It found that well-funded and properly implemented programs enabled students with limited English to catch up to their English-fluent counterparts at a faster rate. It also found that it took students nearly five years to fully master English, not the one year that English-only backers claimed would be needed for immersion programs.

The English-only amendment fuels the racially tinged myth that immigrants don’t want to learn English. The gargantuan waiting lists for enrollment in adult English classes at schools and community centers shatter that myth. Still, passage of an English-only amendment in the immigration bill could embolden state legislators to further slash programs that help limited English speaking students.

The Bush administration has walked a fine line on the issue of bilingual education. It has not slashed federal funding for these programs. But it also has not increased funding for them in the past five years, even though the demand for the programs is greater than ever.

Some senators recognized the mischief that an English-only amendment could cause. Buried in the Senate’s counter-amendment that declared English a “common and unifying language” is a pledge not to cut federal aid for bilingual services and programs.

Bush has repeatedly said that speaking English is the fast track to citizenship. State-imposed English-only laws won’t speed anyone along that track. A federal English-only amendment won’t either.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an associate editor at New America Media and the author of The Crisis in Black and Black”(Middle Passage Press). TheHutchinsonReport blog is now at www.earlofarihutchinson.com.

Although I’m a Southerner by birth and upbringing, I’ve never handled a snake in a religious context. Our church didn’t even use tambourines. All I know of the spiritual side of snake-handling comes from books like Dennis Covington’s memoir Salvation on Sand Mountain and Weston LaBarre’s more scholarly They Shall Take up Serpents.

Secular snake-handling is another story. Depending on the disposition of the snake, it can be a pleasurably relaxing experience (for the handler if not the reptile). A few weeks ago, I was at UC’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology for the Cal Day open house, passing around a large but tractable Colombian red-tailed boa constrictor and talking about snakes, when I got some gratifying news from a young naturalist named Henry. Henry and his father said they had been finding gopher snakes at the Berkeley Marina. I was thrilled, in fact: I had no idea they were still around.

If you want a snake for handling, I would not hesitate to recommend a gopher snake—especially a gopher snake that hasn’t completely warmed up yet. A warm gopher snake can be feisty.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t advise picking up a garter snake, a decorative but foul-tempered creature with disgusting habits.

When a gopher snake is averse to being handled, it will let you know. It coils up, flattens its head, hisses, and vibrates its tail rapidly. Against a substrate like dry leaves, the effect of the tail vibration can be very rattlesnake-like—a resemblance that was first noted by the Lewis and Clark expedition, and that has probably gotten a number of gopher snakes killed.

Some biologists have claimed that this performance is a case of Batesian mimicry, in which a relatively benign creature has evolved a resemblance to another species which is venomous, otherwise dangerous, or at least unpalatable. They also claim that gopher snakes and western rattlesnakes have similar color patterns.

Henry Walter Bates, one of those 19th-century British amateurs and author of The Naturalist on the River Amazons, described the phenomenon in tropical butterflies. The classic instance of Batesian mimicry among snakes is, of course, the nonvenomous milksnakes and kingsnakes whose red-black-and-yellow banding resembles that of the venomous coral snakes. The viceroy butterfly is a Batesian mimic of the distasteful (to most birds, although not to black-headed grosbeaks) monarch. Behavioral mimicry is rarer, but there are examples.

But is that really what’s going on with the gopher snake and the rattlesnake? In the 1980s, Samuel Sweet at UC Santa Barbara decided to test the notion by comparing several California populations of the two species. He hypothesized that the snakes’ microhabitats might have something to do with the degree of resemblance. Rattlers and gopher snakes overlap broadly in habitat preference, but previous studies had shown rattlesnakes to be more common in chaparral and woodland, and gopher snakes to be more common in open grassland. Where trees and shrubs are scarce, as in the Carrizo Plain, both are found in grassland.

Sweet photographed snakes of both species against backgrounds of coastal grassland, Carrizo Plain grassland, and mountain chaparral, and analyzed the extent to which the snake’s pattern matched its setting. He found that gopher snakes were more visually cryptic in grassland, rattlers in chaparral. For both coastal and mountain populations, rattlesnakes and gopher snakes had significantly different patterns.

It was only in the Carrizo Plain that rattlers and gopher snakes really looked alike. And it was in this habitat that both species were equally cryptic. The implication Sweet drew from this was that there was no model-mimic relationship: gopher snakes had not evolved to look like rattlesnakes. Instead, each species had evolved to blend into its preferred microhabitat, to conceal itself from predators and prey. Where the microhabitat was the same, the patterns were similar—but this was the result of convergence, not mimicry.

What about the head-spreading and tail-vibrating, though? Sweet pointed out that other nonvenomous snakes that don’t particularly resemble rattlers—among them, racers, corn snakes, kingsnakes, whipsnakes, and indigo snakes—have comparable, if somewhat less intense, defensive displays. This suite of behaviors seems widespread in venomous and nonvenomous snakes alike. Although it would have benefited any nonvenomous snake to be mistaken for a venomous one, he concluded that there was little direct evidence that the gopher snake was a behavioral mimic of the rattlesnake.

It’s interesting that California ground squirrels, who’ve had a long evolutionary relationship with both rattlers and gopher snakes, have no trouble telling them apart. But the squirrels are fooled by the uncannily rattler-like vocalization of the burrowing owl, which holds up better than the gopher snake’s display as an example of behavioral mimicry.

Photograph by Bob Dyer / Petaluma Wetlands Alliance

A young gopher snake winds his way through the sand at Petaluma’s Schollenberger Park.

Arts & Events

It’s not at all strange for a bus half-filled with important local officials to roll through the streets of a California city, pointing out tracts and plots and buildings along the way. It is unusual when the other half of the bus is filled with longtime city residents and community activists, and the purpose of the tour is not so much to plot the city’s future as it is to make sure its past is understood.

On Saturday, Richmond’s Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park held its fourth such tour of the city’s World War II era sites, with participants who lived through the era encouraged to add their commentary to the park service’s tour guide.

The result was an exercise in living history.

In one of Richmond’s Latino sections, the bus passed the Mexican Baptist Church near the Atchison Village housing projects, with tour guide Naomi Torres of the National Park Service talking about how the village was once an open field where Mexican-American farmers grazed their livestock and then was built as housing for Kaiser shipyard workers who flocked to Richmond during the war years.

When Torres was finished, Contra Costa Grand Jury Foreman Antonio Medrano, who grew up in Richmond, pointed to the Mexican Baptist Church and said, “I bet you thought all Mexicans were Catholic,” which began his telling of the history of Mexico’s evangelical Protestant movement that later migrated north into the United States.

At the Winters Building off of MacDonald Avenue, which served as both a dance hall and an air raid shelter during the war and which now houses the East Bay Center for The Performing Arts, another Park Ranger asked if anyone on the bus remembered attending any dances there.

“That place was for white folks,” one of the older black participants pointed out. “You have to remember who was welcome and who wasn’t welcome on MacDonald Avenue in those days.” There followed stories of Richmond’s deeply segregated days when young white drivers cruised the city’s main street with impunity but black drivers were cited and arrested by police.

And at a stop along the wharf next to the enormous closed Ford Assembly Plant, some five football fields long, which once housed a tank production factory and is now being prepared for commercial and housing redevelopment by the City of Richmond, one longtime Parchester Village resident recalled how she and her neighbors could see the lights from munitions loading accident explosions on the docks from their windows.

Rosie the Riveter National Park community liaison Betty Reid Soskin, who conceived and designed the tours and works on them jointly with National Park Service Outreach Specialist Naomi Torres, calls them “resoundingly successful,” and says they came out of a desire to “raise the awareness in the City of Richmond that they are in the middle of a national park. There is a misconception that the park is just down by the shoreline but the heart of it is in the Iron Triangle, which is one of the most troubled parts of the city. We’re hoping that the tours can help Richmond form a new identity of itself. We have such a rich history here.”

Soskin says she has resisted suggestions to simply have officials take the tours by themselves, without the longtime residents. “Without the residents telling their stories,” Soskin said, “we’d simply be passing by building sites that we pass by every day, without knowing their historic significance.”

Included on the tours was the Galileo Club on South 23rd Street, where Richmond’s largest single ethnic group before World War II—Italians—had a social club (one of the participants explained that because of Richmond’s sensitive wartime industries, only American citizens could live in the city, and many Italian families were broken up when the elders who were non-citizen immigrants were forced to move out).

Other areas visited were the Pullman District, which includes the still-standing, New Orleans-style hotel where Pullman porters stayed between runs as well as buildings where Pullman passenger cars were repaired and restored; the Park Florist on MacDonald, which was once owned by a Japanese family who were forced to sell the business when they were relocated to an internment camp; and the Kaiser Field Hospital, one of the first structures shipbuilding magnate Henry J. Kaiser used as part of his health care system for his shipyard workers, a system that eventually grew into Kaiser Permanente.

The tours start at the headquarters of the Rosie the Riveter park at Richmond City Hall, where participants view some of the historic memorabilia. Among them are ID badges, ration stamps, welder’s guns, and a welder’s mask used by a Japanese-American welder “until the day he went into an internment camp,” according to park officials.

The photo I.D. badges are especially poignant, giving a human face to an era that is close to us in time, but often forgotten. Housed on a single table in the back of the City Hall complex, the items are being collected for a permanent park museum. While the location for the museum has yet to be determined, park officials say that some of the memorabilia in the park’s projected new Visitors Center at the Ford Assembly Plant.

A park official explained that the park is both a collection of World War II-era historical cites as well as a documentation of activities on what was called “the home front” during the war.

“And we’re using home front in its broadest possible term,” he said. “We’re referring to anything that happened domestically during the war years. Whatever people were doing at that time was affected by the war, or had an effect on the war.”

The official said that while the Rosie the Riveter Park was headquartered in Richmond, the park is a collection of all the west coast wartime history, from Washington State to Southern California.

The fifth and final tour is scheduled for later this summer, but Soskin says the park is seeking more funding to extend the events. The tours have been funded by a grant from PG&E. Slots for the fifth tour are already filled, but at a feedback session following Saturday’s tour, park officials said they were open to suggestions to expand the tours and make them available to more community residents, groups, and officials.

It’s a warm, breezy spring day. I’m sitting in the courtyard at Espresso Roma, lunching on a terrific spinach-mushroom frittata and watching the world of Elmwood pass by. Inside laptops silently hum while lattes are sipped. Though my meter is ticking I’m in no hurry to move. Once here, why would I want to leave?

Berkeley’s Elmwood neighborhood invites lingering and strolling. Stretching along College Avenue from the University to the Oakland border, on gentle terrain past village-like shops and classic architecture, the neighborhood gives you the feeling that of having effortlessly arrived at a long-desired location. On a miniature scale, Elmwood offers something for everyone. A stable neighborhood structure, tree-lined streets, friendly neighborhood shops, global cuisine and cultural venues explain my dilemma, my desire to linger despite a parking meter.

After the Gold Rush and the founding of the University of California, newcomers to Berkeley sought quality homes with proximity to campus and nearby Telegraph Avenue businesses. Aided by Key streetcars along College Avenue, Elmwood Park, named after shade-providing elms, began to expand with both residential and commercial entities. One hundred years later, much of its original small-town charm remains.

The business district of any neighborhood reflects the needs of its populace; the residential areas reflect its heart. Recognizing pride in ownership, I happily strolled along Benvenue and Hillegass Avenues and Russell Street admiring classic brown shingles, craftsman and storybook tutor homes. Even the public library made me pause. Handsome brick and timbers with peaked roof, sunlight filtered through and glancing off ancient leafy elms, benches outside and comfortable seating indoors begged for time spent with a good book.

Admiring architecture doesn’t require a degree in styles or movements. You don’t need to know what it is to know what you like. Two- and three-story brown shingles trimmed in forest-green, gentian-blue or brick-red with limpet like purple wisteria coating one side; a broad front porch with Adirondack chairs awaiting your repose or a bedroom balcony for that first cup of morning coffee. A pale-green Queen Anne with small multi-paned windows, another stately home fronted by massive white columns. Gardens to drool over: flower-filled with roses and rhododendrons, framed by years-old pines, palms and oaks, alive with birdsong. Homes to treasure.

Elmwood’s business district radiates from a hub at College and Ashby, limited in size but limitless in choices. There’s something for every taste. Start with food. In the mood for something Eastern? You can sample the tastes of Pakistan and India at Naan ’N’ Curry or enter the cool, elegant rooms of King Yen, where large open windows shaded beneath eggplant awnings beckon you in for a gracious meal. When you’re in a hurry, pop into Manpuku and grab a delicious assortment of pre-packed combination sushi. Study the illustrated menu to get a preview of their bento and ramen offerings.

Red wine, olive oil and al dente pasta call up the tastes of Italy. Trattoria La Siciliana announces Bon Appetito along with a special board listing offerings of antipasti, primi and secondi dishes. Inside the ocher-washed walls and tiled floors and tables invoke the spirit of a secret Italian café. Stop at A.G. Ferrari Foods to bring Italy home. Tapenade di olive and asiago fresco before ravioli con spinaci e ricotta under ragu alla Bolognese washed down with Belvedere Umbria—worthy of a meal from the finest Italian villa!

Gordo’s Taqueria and La Cascada Taqueria can satisfy your taste for over the border while the Holy Land Restaurant offers kosher and vegetarian choices. La Mediterranée’s sidewalk tables waft the aromas of hummus and baba ghanous. Cold cucumber soup or warm filled fillos, the wonderful blend of spices will entice you in.

All that food made me feel sluggish, ready to work it all off. Bolfing’s Elmwood Hardware has supplies for whatever project you’ve been putting off, like putting up a Shaker peg rack, perusing the decorator’s palette for just the right shade of goldenrod or picking up a new LED flashlight for your earthquake supplies.

Thinking about your garden, or lack of one? Inside Mrs. Dalloway’s I was inspired to landscape and plant. Yellow Gloveables, fine Felco clippers and Renee’s Garden seeds could get me started. A lovely space, as airy and fresh as a spring garden, displaying a wonderful assortment of books, potted plants, garden-related accoutrements and a red wicker chair made it hard for me to leave.

Indulgence is easy along College Avenue. Jeremy’s discounted prices allow shopping without guilt. I spotted flowered sequined skirts, light-as-air sundresses and a striped cream sweater that mimicked a tropical spree. The turquoise and silver jewelry at Bill’s Trading Post would be the perfect accent. And who wouldn’t covet a finely crafted Pomo feather basket or an obsidian dream catcher?

Far Leaves satisfies the taste for tea in an attractive, peaceful setting. Patrons are encouraged to try new blends and brew their choice of black, oolong, green, herbal infusion or rare tea in-house for optimum enjoyment. Take home a lovely ceramic tea set to prolong the pleasure.

Cultural venues are easy walking distance from Elmwood’s hub. The Elmwood Theater is a Berkeley landmark, surviving since 1914 and saved by the Friends of the Theater in 1994. Touted as a family theater in its prime, today’s offerings cater to a broader family but better reflect the interests of the community.

A National Historic Landmark, the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts is reminiscent of a rustic National Park lodge. Dark brown exposed framing with redwood rafters and small wall lamps set the scene for theater, dance and music performances, Lego and Mad Science summer camps and classes for all ages.

Meter satisfied, I ambled back to my sidewalk perch for another cappuccino and just a while longer in the village of Elmwood. Embodying the sense of having attained Berkeley-style achievement, Elmwood may be small in size but its essence looms large.

Photograph by Marta Yamamoto

Choices for excellent international cuisine are close at hand along College Avenue in the Elmwood District.

In the 1880s and ‘90s, few East Bay architects were as fashionable as Alfred Washington Pattiani (1855–1935). Italian name notwithstanding, Pattiani, who was born in Chillicothe, Ohio, was descended from a well-to-do German family. His paternal grandfather, Alois Fahrnbacher of Landshut, Bavaria, was a tobacco manufacturer, commercial court assessor, and a member of the Bavarian parliament.

His mother, Elisabeth von Bergen, came from the Baltic port city of Stettin and studied music—perhaps in Weimar, for she is said to have been a student of Franz Liszt, who taught piano there beginning in 1848. Possibly also in Weimar, Elisabeth met Christian Alfred Fahrnbacher.

Like many German students of their generation, the two were apparently involved in the 1848 revolution. They ended up marrying and fleeing to the United States, where they changed their name to Pattiani.

She became a published composer under the name Eliza Pattiani or simply Madame Pattiani and is known for marches she composed for Northwestern University and the California State Normal School (now San Jose State University). Her husband was a daguerreotype photographer in Cincinnati and Chicago.

In 1870, after having lived in St. Louis, Chicago, and Evanston, Ill., the family moved to San Jose for health reasons. Son Alfred began his architectural apprenticeship at age 15 while completing his schooling at the Business College of San Jose.

For two years he studied architecture under Theodore Lenzen, San Jose’s preeminent architect. When his father died in 1873, Alfred began working as a draftsman for various Bay Area architects. In 1879, he built himself a house in Alameda, where he established a building firm in 1882.

Billing himself as Real Estate Broker and Builder, Pattiani catered to the affluent class, designing and building hundreds of residences in Alameda, Oakland, and Berkeley. His styles included Stick-Eastlake, Queen Anne, Shingle, and Colonial Revival. Although a number of his Berkeley houses are extant—including a row of six cottages on the 2100 block of Ward St. and two elegant Queen Annes at Blake and Fulton—many that were built near the UC campus fell victim to university expansion. In 1973, the razing of a Pattiani house on a prominent corner in Alameda was the impetus that led to the passage of Proposition A, which saved much of that city’s Victorian residential character.

In 1889, Pattiani built his 185th house on the southwest corner of Ward and Fulton streets. This large Queen Anne sported a generous polygonal turret crowned by a bell-shaped cupola and displayed a full complement of gingerbread ornamentation. The client who paid $3,500 for the house was San Francisco wine merchant Samuel B. Stanley. Unaccountably, Stanley preferred the charms of San Jose to those of Berkeley. In February 1891, he sold the house and two additional lots to the Sadler family.

Caleb and Lydia Sadler were English immigrants who owned a San Francisco fancy goods and notions business. Their second son, Frank E. Sadler, would eventually own the Sadler’s store at Shattuck Avenue and Center Street, selling books, stationery, photographic supplies, and sporting goods. Sadler’s also carried a distinctive line of picture postcards, always displaying the photo in an oval vignette.

The Sadlers spent only a few years in the house. In 1894, they sold it to Mary E. and Charles E. Finney and moved to the Northside. A mechanical engineer, Finney was an enterprising man. In 1899 he built three houses directly to the south of his house. These were announced as the first in the area to contain indoor plumbing. Ten years later, Finney moved his house, which had sat in the center of a triple lot at 2154 Ward Street, to the northeast corner of the lot, changing the address to 2156 Ward St.

Shortly thereafter, Finney expanded his house to the rear and converted it to two flats. He also built a second house next door at 2154 Ward St. During World War II, a subsequent owner of 2156 Ward subdivided the second-floor flat into two apartments and added a fourth unit in the enlarged third floor. With every successive remodel, the roofline was altered, rooms assumed new functions, and kitchens and bathrooms sprouted in any available space.

In 1979, Stephen Johnson bought the house as income property. Five years later, he and Erna Andre decided to make it their home. The first floor still retained many original features, including the twin parlor fireplaces, ceiling rosettes, moldings and wainscoting. However, there was little clue as to many rooms’ original function.

The couple sought guidance from their neighbor, architect Ron Bogley, with whom they visited several Pattiani houses in Alameda. Anthony Bruce of BAHA introduced them to Pattiani expert Paul Roberts, who explained how the rooms would have been laid out by the architect (Pattiani usually arranged the front and back parlors along one side of the hallway, with the dining room on the other side toward the rear).

In 1985, after exhaustive research in several libraries, Bogley prepared drawings representing the house’s external elevations and floor plans as they would have been in 1889, 1910, and 1946, as well as a set of working drawings. During this first phase of the restoration, the Johnsons reclaimed the original bedrooms and bathroom out of the front second-floor apartment. Wood moldings were hand-stripped. Period brass hardware and antique light fixtures were installed. Bradbury & Bradbury Victorian wallpapers were put up. When authentic items weren’t to be found, replicas were made to order, as was the case with the master-bedroom doors, second-floor ceiling rosettes, and twenty corner blocks for the door frames.

In 1994, the front steps were rebuilt, receiving new railings and newel posts. A few years later, the Johnsons reinstated the house as a single-family home by creating an internal stairwell in the 1910 rear addition. They relocated the dining room from the back parlor to its original space across the hall, remodeled the kitchen, and created a large “antique” bathroom in the second-floor space previously occupied by the rear apartment’s kitchen.

Four years ago, it was time to attack the exterior, which not only looked haphazard but was seriously dilapidated. Contractor Christopher Osborn re-established cohesiveness, shingling the second- and third stories to set them apart from the channel rustic siding on the ground floor. The turret finial was taken down and repaired, and the turret was clad with scalloped copper shingles. The octagonal porthole in the turret’s dome illuminates a most unusual vaulted space that currently serves as an aerie bed chamber.

In the final phase, begun last year, the Johnsons renovated the first-floor rooms and interior staircase. Newel post replicas were made to replace the missing original ones, the wainscoting was taken down, cleaned, and reassembled, and the parlors and hallway were painted.

In 2004, the house was featured in BAHA’s “Berkeley 1890” house tour, and this week it was one of only two houses to receive BAHA’s preservation award for both exterior and interior restoration.

For homeowners who are contemplating historic restoration, Steve Johnson has some words of advice: “The original builder did it his way for a reason—try to understand it before you change things. Do the work to last; don’t take shortcuts, or you’ll be redoing it in a few years. Lastly, there is no financial reward for this kind of restoration. Your reward will come from the joy of living in a grand old house.”

The writer is indebted to Paul Roberts for information on A.W. Pattiani’s life.

A friend of mine has a bassist living upstairs who is still working out the chords to In a Gadda Da Vida after living there for about 12 years. My friend is a patient person but she’s begun to exhibit something of a tick and often looks dolefully into space for long periods of time, returning from her reverie only when the music has stopped for some short spell.

I don’t thing that’s she’s given to thoughts of homicide normally but she’s recently begun asking a lot of unwholesome questions about firearms and those CIA poisoning tricks they used to talk about in the sixties (probably while “In a Gadda Da Vida” was playing in the background).

I have begun to suggest that she might want to try some sound control techniques in the building before moving on to anything more rash. She has agreed and we’ll see how things work out. These problems can be complex and changes in buildings which are designed to reduce sound can be expensive, but if that cute little freckly kid from next door has grown into a 17-year-old drummer in a band called Trama, you might also benefit from some of these notions. So here goes.

If your problem is between the floors of a building, one of the best techniques is to use what is called Resilient Channel (sometimes called sound channel). This requires replacement of the sheetrock ceilings or the addition of another layer to the ceiling. If you have plenty of ceiling height, it’s fine to leave the first layer of sheetrock, although testing by National Research Council Canada suggests that this is not a good technique. First let me explain resilient channel.

This is a Z-shaped piece of metal that comes in 10’ lengths and is screwed onto the bare rafters of a ceiling before sheetrock is applied. The channel is run perpendicular to the floor joists so that it runs across the bottom edge of many joists. Once you’ve run them every 16” from one wall to the other, you hang your sheetrock ceiling to the channel, not to the joists. The shape of the channel is such that the sheetrock has a bit of bounce to it and rather than being firmly mounted to the floor above it sort of hangs and is, therefore, much less able to transmit sound through the floor.

The resilient metal allows the sound to get lost between the floor framing and the sheetrock.

You can also add some other things to this methodology if you like:

• You can insulate the space between the joists, in the floor thickness using common insulation. You can also install Sound Board, which is essentially a fibrous cellulose matting that’s 1/2” thick.

• You can also install this material across the bottom of the joists prior to installing the Rezi-channel but remember that you’ll need longer screws. It’s a good idea to use 5/8” sheetrock on the ceiling if you want to really kill those bad vibes.

For the really serious isolationist, cement tile-backer can be used as a part of such an assembly, although this is probably better for high frequencies than for low ones. You’ll want to remember to bring the launch codes with you when you lock down for the night.

For walls between living spaces you can use sound channel and insulation or additional layers of sheetrock but the best method in my opinion involves building one of two types of party walls:

My favorite works like this and you’ll actually be rebuilding the wall between the two spaces (unless this is a new project): You build a wall with two sets of studs (upright 2x4’s) on a 2x6 bottom and top member. One set of 2x4’s is built to one edge of the 2x6 facing one room. The other set is built to the other edge facing the other room.

They sort of stagger across the length of the wall. Each 2x4 occupies most of the wall space but none of them touch the sheetrock of both sides. Each one touches and attaches to just one. So when you hit the wall on one side (or strike a power chord), one set of 2x4’s will vibrate but none of the other 2x4’s or the other layer of sheetrock will.

I used this technique in a duplex in Richmond many years ago and when we were done, we could holler on one side and hear virtually nothing on the other. Great for marital disputes or privacy during intimate moments.

The second type of party wall is simply a second wall built almost against the first with one or two layers of sheetrock in between. This eats up another few inches of room space and seems less efficient than the staggered technique. Nonetheless, it is simple and can be added to an existing wall.

I should also mention that carpeting with thick padding is a great sound absorber and requires no significant alteration to the building.

For sounds next door (like Trama’s weekly band practice), there’s nothing quite like double-glazed windows. It’s impressive how well these advents of modern building science perform at sound inhibition. About 12 year ago, I was inspecting a small house built right beside the 580 freeway.

It was up a small hill so that you looked right over onto the freeway and the hill acted like an amphitheater capturing and funneling the sound right toward the house. Outside, for our best efforts, we could not converse but when we walked into the house, recently fitted with these new-fangled windows, the sound was little more than a distant hum. It was striking.

This works equally well for neighbors that fight, dogs that bark all night or whatever drives you to and beyond distraction. If you work nights and sleep days, it might just keep you sane.

I’ll add one last measure for the band members. If you live at Mom’s house or the police have now been at your house more than 4 times, you might try the following technique.

Drum kits can be placed on a floating floor or in a hanging room. You can build a floor that sits above the primary floor in the room and either place it on isolation bumpers or hung from the ceiling. bumpers can be found at Granger’s (or another industrial supply house).

I suggested these bumpers when my osteopath-friend Catherine was being assaulted by the vibration created by a restaurant ventilation system in her building. They can be used on motors or anything that creates vibration or noise. You can also hang a floor from the ceiling by use of cables or threaded rod.

The secondary floor need only hang a fraction of an inch above the floor to prevent transmission of the vibration from a drum kit. The hangers (rods or cables) can employ isolation devices like the one mentioned above where they connect to the ceiling above.

If you build a room instead of just a floor and hang it from above, you can really isolate the sound. There are certainly more techniques and high tech materials one can buy if you want to take this further but hopefully, this will get you started on the road to serenity.

So if the person you’re sharing the duplex with starts a Herman’s Hermits cover band, don’t get mad, don’t get even, just get resilient.

Got a question about home repairs and inspections? Send them to Matt Cantor, in care of East Bay Real Estate, at realestate@berkeleydailyplanet.com.

I rarely venture into my garden with constructive intent but without my Felco pruners and my hori-hori. Most of the time those hand tools are enough because I have a very small garden. Sometimes, though, I need to do something that requires two hands and a bigger tool, and I have my favorites among those too.

You know how the favorite recipes get spotted with flying sauces? Sometimes you can tell which are a gardener’s favorite tools, because they bear a similar patina; they’re polished by soil and the chrism of skin oils. I think it increases their value.

I actually spent $50 on a spade—some years back, when $50 was an even more significant investment than now. I’d looked at several trenching spades, but Smith & Hawken’s “poacher’s spade” won my heart when I picked it up.

I did postpone my gratification until after S&H changed its always overheated catalogue prose about the item; it just bugged me too much to read about the poacher sneaking around the estate, “dog at bay,” until he found a rabbit, cut its warren with the spade, and let the dog catch it. A dog at bay is anything but quiet.

Fortunately the spade is better then the copy. It’s a D-handled tool, which I generally dislike, but it works well in our heavy clay. The blade is long and narrow and fixed well onto its handle. It has enough footspace to use one’s whole weight on, and the leverage to make it count.

My other, longer-handled spade is a “lady shovel,” or “flower shovel.” I’m not that ladylike but I do know the advantage of a small-bladed spade in that clay, and of making two small loads to lift instead of one big one.

I recommend lady shovels for anyone who is older than 20 and/or smaller than a linebacker, for gardening here.

If I were really ambitious, I’d use a bastard file to sharpen the blade ends of both spades. This is kinder to the plants whose roots I bother when I dig, and indispensable for root-pruning plants to keep their spread in bounds.

The other tool-maintenance secret I learned in school (Remember, I’m someone who had to go to post-grad classes to learn “lefty loosey, righty tighty.”) is the Bucket of Oily Sand.

This is what it sounds like: a sound bucket, wide enough for the business ends of every soil-contact tool you have, filled with sand over which you’ve poured oil. What kind of oil? Something nonflammable, please, and nontoxic or inert.

If you remember to wipe it off after use, motor oil is OK. Keep it where you store your tools.

When you finish digging, take your mud-encrusted tool, scrape off the worst, and pump the blade up and down in the bucket, a la butter churn. Cleans, polishes, and protects against moisture all in seconds.

For more specialized tasks I have some more esoteric tools, and next week I’ll tell you where to look for the niftiest.

Reduced City Services Today Call ahead to ensure programs or services you desire will be available. 981-CITY. www.cityofberkeley.info

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park, ongoing on Fridays until impeachment is realized. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Gordon Graham on “Vietnam & Cambodia: History, Culture and Travel” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $13.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925 or 665-9020.

“Can We Stop the US Attack on Iran?” with Jeanette Hassberg of the War and Law League and Ali Mirardal of the Iranian-American Community of Northern California at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship, 1924 Cedar at Bonita. Donation $10. 528-5403.

Berkeley Chess School classes for students in grades 1-8 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. A drop-in, rated scholastic tournament follows from 7 to 8 p.m. at 1581 LeRoy Ave., Room 17. 843-0150.

Berkeley Chess Club meets Fridays at 8 p.m. at the East Bay Chess Club, 1940 Virginia St. Players at all levels are welcome. 845-1041.

Chocolate and Chalk Art Festival on sidewalks along the entire length of Solano Avenue in Berkeley and Albany from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Register early for the chalk drawing contest at 1561 Solano Peralta Park; 1850 Solano at Andronico’s Market; and 1127 Solano at Royal Ground Coffee. Artists chalk is available for a fee. Judging at 4 p.m. 527-5358.

Berkeley Path Wanderers Association North Berkeley Walk Meet at 10 a.m. at the entrance to the Berkeley Rose Garden, west side of Euclid Avenue between Bayview Place and Eunice. Bring water, snack, and sun protection. The pace will be moderate, with some steep stairways. 526-7609. www.berkeleypaths.org

Family Day at Union Point Park with an Aztec Run/Walk for Education, at 8:30 a.m., dedication of “Wave Oculus” the new public art insatallation at 11 a.m. and kite flying at 11:30 a.m. at 2311 Embarcadero East, Oakland.

Brooks Island Voyage Paddle the rising tide across the Richmond Harbor Channel to Brooks Island from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. For experienced boaters who can provide their own canoe or kayak and safety gear. For ages 14 and up with parent participation. Cost is $20-$22. Registration required. 636-1684.

Walking Tour of Historic Oakland Churches and Temples Meet at 10 a.m. at the front of the First Presbyterian Church at 2619 Broadway. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/

Podcasting Class In two days, public radio professionals teach you interview skills, writing for the ear, editing tricks and much more. Sat. and Sun. from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. at KQED Studios, 2601 Mariposa St., SF. For information call 415-335-0500. contentcrashcourse@audioluxe.org

Sanskrit Chanting Workshop for the whole family at 7 p.m. at Sacred Space Yoga Sanctuary, 816 Bancroft Way at 6th. Cost is$15-$35. 496-6047.

Healing Energy Workshop from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at First Unitarian Church of Oakland, 685 14th St. Cost is $80. www.tibetanqigong.org

Pre-School Storytime for 3-5 year olds at 11 a.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave., through June 22. 526-3720, ext. 17.

Nature Drawing for Youth, ages 8-15. Learn field drawing skills through fun exercises, while learning about the plants and animals of the area. From 2:30 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $15-$17. Registration required. 636-1684.

Berkeley City Club free tour from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Tours are sponsored by the Berkeley City Club and the Landmark Heritage Foundation. Donations welcome. The Berkeley City Club is located at 2315 Durant Ave. For group reservations or more information, call 848-7800 or 883-9710.

Reduced City Services Today Call ahead to ensure programs or services you desire will be available. 981-CITY. www.cityofberkeley.info

Memorial Day Open House at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Vist our resident critters, make nature crafts and learn about the park, from 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. 525-2233.

“Great Hikes in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Park” with Andrew Dean Nystrom, winner of the 2005 National Outdoor Book Award, at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. Free. 527-4140.

World Affairs/Politics Discussion Group for people 60+ years old meets at 10:15 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave., through June 19th. Cost is $2.50 per week includes refreshments. 524-9122.

Raging Grannies of the East Bay invites new folks to come join us the 2nd and 4th Tues, of each month, from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. to sing (any voice will do), help plan our next gig, or write outrageously political lyrics to old familiar tunes, and have fun at Berkeley Gray Panthers office, 1403 Addison St., in Andronico’s mall. 548-9696.

Family Story Time at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Branch Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Free, all ages welcome. 524-3043.

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. 215-7672, 524-9992.

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830.

“Palestinian Lesbians Speak Out from the Occupation” at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Friends Church, 1600 Sacramento St. at Cedar. Donation $10-$20. Sponsored by Bay Area Women in Black. www.bayareawomeninblack.org

Walking Tour of Oakland Chinatown Meet at 10 a.m. at the courtyard fountain in the Pacific Renaissance Plaza at 388 Ninth St. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours

“American Dictators” A documentary by Alex Jones on the election of 2004 and the degeneration of our political process at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donations of $5 accepted.

Bayswater Book Club meets to discuss “American Theocracy” by Kevin Phillips at 6:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble, El Cerrito. Also organizing meeting to become a Democratic Central Committee Chartered Club. 433-2911.

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes and a warm hat. Heavy rain cancels. 548-9840.

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6:30 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704. www.ecologycenter.org

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park, ongoing on Fridays until impeachment is realized. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Kim Marienthal Realtor and Board Member of “Liveable Berkeley.” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $13.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. 526-2925 or 665-9020.

“Postcard from Cuba” A report-back from the Berkeley Palma Soriano Sister City delegation on their recent trip to Cuba at 7 p.m. at the Neibyl-Proctor Library, 6501 Telegraph Ave. Donation $5-$20. 717-9663.

Walking Tour of Old Oakland around the restored 1870s business district. Meet at 10 a.m. in front of G.B. Ratto’s at 827 Washington St. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234.

East Bay Atheists with a video of Richard Dawkins, Oxford University Professor of Evolutionary Biology, on ways to address the arguments of Creationists against evolution, at 2 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. 222-7580.

California Writers Club with winners of the Fifth Grade Writing Contest at 10 a.m. at Barnes & Noble, Jack London Square. 272-0120.

Embracing Diversity Films “Out of the Shadow” a documentary of a woman with paranoid schizophrenia, at 7 p.m. at Albany High School Library, 603 Key Route Blvd. Please enter through gym doors on Thousand Oaks Blvd. Suitable for children over 12. Free. Discussion follows. 527-1328.

READINGS AND LECTURES

From Chaucer to Pynchon in 90 Minutes Students rread from six centuries of literature at 6 p.m. in Room 210, Vista College Bldg., 2020 Milvia.

Chamber Music Sundaes featuring San Francisco Symphony musicians and friends at 3 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Tickets are $9-$21 at the door 415-584-5946. www.chambermusicsundaes.org

What if the animal kingdom, in all its vast diversity, filed a class action suit against humanity, for its presumption at designating itself as steward of all the beasts of the world, hunting and domesticating them?

Something like this happens in Island of Animals, playing this weekend at Fremont’s Park Cinema (converted into a live theater).

Hafiz Karmali, a director visiting from Paris, has created a stage adaptation of a medieval Islamic fable by the illuminati of the Ikhwan al-Safa, “Brethern of Purity,” a 10th-century scholarly society in Basra (now Iraq) who produced an encyclopedic work on everything from Cosmology and Revelation to Ethics and Aesthetics—a forerunner of the great Humanistic encyclopedias of the Enlightenment of 18th-century Europe.

When a shipload of men from all countries is wrecked on a “desert isle” abounding in fauna, the humans set up shop as the masters—business as usual. The animals meet with their fellows in each family of beasts—birds of prey, songbirds, creeping things, and so on—and choose representatives to take their case to the wise King of the Jinn (the genies of the Arabian Nights, beings “of smokeless vapor”). While the humans mutter about who to bribe or threaten, the animal representatives sing, twitter, roar, squawk, hiss and buzz their pleading ... but what if there could be found a human as diverse in talents as the animals themselves, one learned and insightful, who embodies the best of the nations of Mankind, mirroring the splendors of heaven and earth?

The idea of The Perfect Man, long a key notion of many Asian religions as well as Eastern Christianity and Gnosticism-Manichaeanism—and central to Renaissance Humanism and its later secularization—is only one of the philosophical nuggets shared by East and West that glisten throughout this charming show, intended very much as a family entertainment, with much humor and panache.

A talented cast slips in and out of various guises, both animal and human, with musical timing, from the conducting of the cacophonous “Animal Symphony, in Asia Minor,” to the awkward tenderness of giraffes (to the tune of “Birds Do It, Bees Do It”), to the enormous virtues of the great pachyderms (accompanied by “Elephant Walk”), all represented by gesture and voice, and by a stage splendid with great Islamic art in painted scenery, calligraphy and in projections.

After a successful run at Thick House on Potrero Hill in San Francisco, this troupe of eight, itself a diverse crew and well-schooled in voice and movement, has sharpened its ensemble work to a fine edge for a piece that constantly shifts in focus, but never wavers in its heartfelt concerns.

Erika Salazar is an enchanting—and enchanted—King of the Jinn; Joseph Estlack (of Mugwumpin) proves a quick study, whether as a grinning, nodding, agreeable simian, as the King of the Beasts, or of the Bees; Shruti Tewari charms as the Narrator, and pleads in court vocally as The Nightingale; Drea Bernardi and Carol Ellis leap from Frog and Cricket to the Aesopian Kalila and Dimna; John Sousa presents the human's case, and has a laugh as a hyena; Sahar Hojat plays Angel and Griffin and dances, as do her alternating colleagues from Ballet Afsaneh, Tara Pandeya and Aliah Najmabadi, with elegant Persian gesture or whirling as dervishes.

The Afghan Coalition brought Hafiz Karmali to the Bay Area from Paris, where he is a doctoral candidate in (and translator of) medieval Shi’ite philosophy. He stages Islamic stories using Western theatrical technique after a career directing in North America. Golden Thread Productions, which stages the annual ReOrient Festival of one-acts concerning the Middle East (and much other intercultural activity), is co-producer, and Sharlyn Sawyer of Ballet Afsaneh, choreographer.

Both Sharlyn and Torange Yeghiazarian of Golden Thread spoke of their enthusiasm in working with such a cosmopolitan theater man and scholar as Hafiz. Torange adding that it has provided the opportunity for her and others “who have been concerned with how religion has influenced the masses, both in the Middle East and here” to “wrestle with religious thought” in a more enlightened context.

Hafiz Karmali smiled when asked his feelings about the experience.

“It’s been a pleasure to perform this tale before such diverse—and nearly sold-out!—audiences as we have had here, especially with so many young people ... It is a chance to share this wonderful story and to dispel some of the myths about Islamic civilization.”

Although I’m a Southerner by birth and upbringing, I’ve never handled a snake in a religious context. Our church didn’t even use tambourines. All I know of the spiritual side of snake-handling comes from books like Dennis Covington’s memoir Salvation on Sand Mountain and Weston LaBarre’s more scholarly They Shall Take up Serpents.

Secular snake-handling is another story. Depending on the disposition of the snake, it can be a pleasurably relaxing experience (for the handler if not the reptile). A few weeks ago, I was at UC’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology for the Cal Day open house, passing around a large but tractable Colombian red-tailed boa constrictor and talking about snakes, when I got some gratifying news from a young naturalist named Henry. Henry and his father said they had been finding gopher snakes at the Berkeley Marina. I was thrilled, in fact: I had no idea they were still around.

If you want a snake for handling, I would not hesitate to recommend a gopher snake—especially a gopher snake that hasn’t completely warmed up yet. A warm gopher snake can be feisty.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t advise picking up a garter snake, a decorative but foul-tempered creature with disgusting habits.

When a gopher snake is averse to being handled, it will let you know. It coils up, flattens its head, hisses, and vibrates its tail rapidly. Against a substrate like dry leaves, the effect of the tail vibration can be very rattlesnake-like—a resemblance that was first noted by the Lewis and Clark expedition, and that has probably gotten a number of gopher snakes killed.

Some biologists have claimed that this performance is a case of Batesian mimicry, in which a relatively benign creature has evolved a resemblance to another species which is venomous, otherwise dangerous, or at least unpalatable. They also claim that gopher snakes and western rattlesnakes have similar color patterns.

Henry Walter Bates, one of those 19th-century British amateurs and author of The Naturalist on the River Amazons, described the phenomenon in tropical butterflies. The classic instance of Batesian mimicry among snakes is, of course, the nonvenomous milksnakes and kingsnakes whose red-black-and-yellow banding resembles that of the venomous coral snakes. The viceroy butterfly is a Batesian mimic of the distasteful (to most birds, although not to black-headed grosbeaks) monarch. Behavioral mimicry is rarer, but there are examples.

But is that really what’s going on with the gopher snake and the rattlesnake? In the 1980s, Samuel Sweet at UC Santa Barbara decided to test the notion by comparing several California populations of the two species. He hypothesized that the snakes’ microhabitats might have something to do with the degree of resemblance. Rattlers and gopher snakes overlap broadly in habitat preference, but previous studies had shown rattlesnakes to be more common in chaparral and woodland, and gopher snakes to be more common in open grassland. Where trees and shrubs are scarce, as in the Carrizo Plain, both are found in grassland.

Sweet photographed snakes of both species against backgrounds of coastal grassland, Carrizo Plain grassland, and mountain chaparral, and analyzed the extent to which the snake’s pattern matched its setting. He found that gopher snakes were more visually cryptic in grassland, rattlers in chaparral. For both coastal and mountain populations, rattlesnakes and gopher snakes had significantly different patterns.

It was only in the Carrizo Plain that rattlers and gopher snakes really looked alike. And it was in this habitat that both species were equally cryptic. The implication Sweet drew from this was that there was no model-mimic relationship: gopher snakes had not evolved to look like rattlesnakes. Instead, each species had evolved to blend into its preferred microhabitat, to conceal itself from predators and prey. Where the microhabitat was the same, the patterns were similar—but this was the result of convergence, not mimicry.

What about the head-spreading and tail-vibrating, though? Sweet pointed out that other nonvenomous snakes that don’t particularly resemble rattlers—among them, racers, corn snakes, kingsnakes, whipsnakes, and indigo snakes—have comparable, if somewhat less intense, defensive displays. This suite of behaviors seems widespread in venomous and nonvenomous snakes alike. Although it would have benefited any nonvenomous snake to be mistaken for a venomous one, he concluded that there was little direct evidence that the gopher snake was a behavioral mimic of the rattlesnake.

It’s interesting that California ground squirrels, who’ve had a long evolutionary relationship with both rattlers and gopher snakes, have no trouble telling them apart. But the squirrels are fooled by the uncannily rattler-like vocalization of the burrowing owl, which holds up better than the gopher snake’s display as an example of behavioral mimicry.

Photograph by Bob Dyer / Petaluma Wetlands Alliance

A young gopher snake winds his way through the sand at Petaluma’s Schollenberger Park.

Report Back from Argentina and Uruguay with Andres Conteris. Reception at 6 p.m., talk and slide show at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, 1924 Cedar at Bonita. Donation $10. 524-6064.

“Hiking the America Discovery Trail” with Ken and Marcia Powers who have walked more than 13,000 trail miles through 30 state, at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. Free. 527-4140.

Embracing Diversity Films “Out of the Shadow” a documentary of a woman with paranoid schizophrenia, at 7 p.m. at Albany High School Library, 603 Key Route Blvd. Enter through gym doors on Thousand Oaks Blvd. Suitable for children over 12. Free. Discussion follows 527-1328.

Berkeley PC Users Group Problem solving and beginners meeting to answer, in simple English, users questions about Windows computers. At 7 p.m. at 1145 Walnut St. corner of Eunice. 527-2177.

Being in the World: Transforming Our Relationships with “Opponents” and “Enemies” with Donald Rothberg at 7:30 p.m. Berkeley Buddhist Monastery, 2304 McKinley. 527-2935.

Raging Grannies of the East Bay invites new folks to come join us from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. to sing and have fun at Berkeley Gray Panthers office, 1403 Addison St., in Andronico’s mall. 548-9696.

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. In case of questionable weather, call around 8 a.m. 215-7672, 524-9992.

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 548-3991.

Tilden Explorers An after-school nature adventure program for 5-7 year olds, who may be accompanied by an adult. We will learn about the seasons from 3:15 to 4:45 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 636-1684.

Walking Tour of Old Oakland “New Era/New Politics” highlights African-American leaders who have made their mark on Oakland. Meet at 10 a.m. and the African American Museum and Library at 659 14th St. 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours

“The Immigration Dilemma: What Kind of Country Are We?” with Cary Sanders, Policy Analyst for The California Immigrant Welfare Collaborative, at 1:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst. Sponsored by the Berkeley East-Bay Gray Panthers. 548-9696.

Richmond Greenway Groundbreaking Ceremony for the new community bicycle and walking trail, at 10 a.m. at the 6th St. crossing of the Greenway at Ohio. For more information call 415-397-2220.

Teen Book Group meets to discuss “Cheaters” by Eric Jerome Dickey at 4 p.m. at Berkeley Public Library, South Branch, 1901 Russell St. 981-6147.

An Evening with Father Michael Hensley Lapsley, South African anti-aparthied activist at 7:30 p.m. at BRJCC, 1414 Walnut St. Donation $10-$20. 848-0237.

Easy Does It Disability Assitance Board of Directors meets at 6:30 p.m. at 1744A University Ave., behind the Lutheran Church. Fully accessible and all welcome. 845-5513.

Berkeley School Volunteers Training workshop for volunteers interested in helping the public schools, from 4:30 to 6 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. 644-8833.

World of Plants Tours Thurs., Sat. and Sun. at 1:30 p.m. at the UC Botanical Garden, 200 Centennial Drive. Cost is $5. 643-2755.

FRIDAY, MAY 26

Reduced City Services Today Call ahead to ensure programs or services you desire will be available. 981-CITY. www.cityofberkeley.info

Impeachment Banner Fridays at 6:45 to 8 a.m. on the Berkeley Pedestrian bridge between Seabreeze Market and the Berkeley Aquatic Park, ongoing on Fridays until impeachment is realized. www. Impeachbush-cheney.com

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Gordon Graham on “Vietnam & Cambodia: History, Culture and Travel” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $13.50, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 526-2925 or 665-9020.

“Can We Stop the US Attack on Iran?” with Jeanette Hassberg of the War and Law League and Ali Mirardal of the Iranian-American Community of Northern California at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship, 1924 Bonita St. at Cedar. Donation $10. 528-5403.

Berkeley Chess School classes for students in grades 1-8 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. A drop-in, rated scholastic tournament follows from 7 to 8 p.m. at 1581 LeRoy Ave., Room 17. 843-0150.

Berkeley Chess Club meets Fridays at 8 p.m. at the East Bay Chess Club, 1940 Virginia St. Players at all levels are welcome. 845-1041.

Chocolate and Chalk Art Festival on sidewalks along the entire length of Solano Avenue in Berkeley and Albany from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Register early for the chalk drawing contest at 1561 Solano Peralta Park; 1850 Solano at Andronico’s Market; and 1127 Solano at Royal Ground Coffee. Artists chalk is available for a fee. Judging at 4 p.m. 527-5358.

Berkeley Path Wanderers Association North Berkeley Walk Meet at 10 a.m. at the entrance to the Berkeley Rose Garden, west side of Euclid Avenue between Bayview Place and Eunice. Bring water, snack, and sun protection. The pace will be moderate, with some steep stairways. 526-7609. www.berkeleypaths.org

Family Day at Union Point Park with an Aztec Run/Walk for Education, at 8:30 a.m., dedication of “Wave Oculus” the new public art insatallation at 11 a.m. and kite flying at 11:30 a.m. at 2311 Embarcadero East, Oakland.

Brooks Island Voyage Paddle the rising tide across the Richmond Harbor Channel to Brooks Island from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. For experienced boaters who can provide their own canoe or kayak and safety gear. For ages 14 and up with parent participation. Cost is $20-$22. Registration required. 636-1684.

Walking Tour of Historic Oakland Churches and Temples Meet at 10 a.m. at the front of the First Prebyterian Church at 2619 Broadway. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/

Podcasting Class In two days, public radio professionals teach you interview skills, writing for the ear, editing tricks and much more. Sat. and Sun. from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. at KQED Studios, 2601 Mariposa St., SF. For information call 415-335-0500. contentcrashcourse@audioluxe.org

Sanskrit Chanting Workshop for the whole family at 7 p.m. at Sacred Space Yoga Sanctuary, 816 Bancroft Way at 6th. Cost is$15-$35. 496-6047.

Healing Energy Workshop from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at First Unitarian Church of Oakland, 685 14th St. Cost is $80. www.tibetanqigong.org

Pre-School Storytime for 3-5 year olds at 11 a.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave., through June 22. 526-3720, ext. 17.

Nature Drawing for Youth, ages 8-15. Learn field drawing skills through fun exercises, while learning about the plants and animals of the area. From 2:30 to 4 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $15-$17. Registration required. 636-1684.

Berkeley City Club free tour from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Tours are sponsored by the Berkeley City Club and the Landmark Heritage Foundation. Donations welcome. The Berkeley City Club is located at 2315 Durant Ave. For group reservations or more information, call 848-7800 or 883-9710.

Memorial Day Open House at Tilden Nature Center, Tilden Park. Vist our resident critters, make nature crafts and learn about the park, from 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. 525-2233.

“Great Hikes in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Park” with Andrew Dean Nystrom, winner of the 2005 National Outdoor Book Award, at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. Free. 527-4140.

World Affairs/Politics Discussion Group for people 60+ years old meets at 10:15 p.m. at the Albany Senior Center, 846 Masonic Ave., through June 19th. Cost is $2.50 per week includes refreshments. 524-9122.

Raging Grannies of the East Bay invites new folks to come join us the 2nd and 4th Tues, of each month, from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. to sing(any voice will do), help plan our next gig, or write outrageously political lyrics to old familiar tunes, and have fun at Berkeley Gray Panthers office, 1403 Addison St., in Andronico’s mall. 548-9696.

Family Story Time at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Branch Library, 61 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Free, all ages welcome. 524-3043.

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. 215-7672, 524-9992.

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. Share your digital images, slides and prints and learn what other photographers are doing. Monthly field trips. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 31

“Palestinian Lesbians Speak Out from the Occupation” at 7 p.m. at Berkeley Friends Church, 1600 Sacramento St. at Cedar. Donation $10-$20. Sponsored by Bay Area Women in Black. www.bayareawomeninblack.org

Walking Tour of Oakland Chinatown Meet at 10 a.m. at the courtyard fountain in the Pacific Renaissance Plaza at 388 Ninth St. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours

“American Dictators” A documentary by Alex Jones on the election of 2004 and the degeneration of our political process at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donations of $5 accepted.

Bayswater Book Club meets to discuss “American Theocracy” by Kevin Phillips at 6:30 p.m. at Barnes and Noble, El Cerrito. Also organizing meeting to become a Democratic Central Committee Chartered Club. 433-2911.

The Berkeley Lawn Bowling Club provides free instruction every Wed. and Sat. at 10:30 a.m. at 2270 Acton St. 841-2174.

Walk Berkeley for Seniors meets every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. at the Sea Breeze Market, just west of the I-80 overpass. Everyone is welcome, wear comfortable shoes and a warm hat. Heavy rain cancels. 548-9840.

Fresh Produce Stand at San Pablo Park from 3 to 6:30 p.m. in the Frances Albrier Community Center. Sponsored by the Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice. 848-1704. www.ecologycenter.org